Help when I turn laptop on makes clicking sound, black screen, says operating system not found. Can not locate any back up discs anywhere, tried putting in a windows xp operating dvd and it says no hard disk found and to power on. What can I do here? don't know what happened.

Hard drive failed, replace it

hi good day
it might the hard disc not rebooting, due to some loose connection. you can tried to open the back cover using a screw diver then look for a loose connection, fix it then reboot the unit. hope this can help thanks for using the fixya.

Can you give me the make and model of the laptops and the operating system (e.g. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7)

If the sound you are referring to is a clicking sound, then it is a hard drive failure.
Your computer is trying to boot up the operating system from the hard drive, but when it fails to access the hard drive, it tries to boot up from other devices configured on the BIOS. Apparently, your next choice for booting the operating system is set to the LAN card. Hence, you get the message "PXE-E61 Media test failure", which means that the computer tried to boot up the operating system over the network but it found out that your network cable is not connected to your computer's network interface card.

It means it cannot find it's operating system or windows to start. When a PC boots it checks for boot devices, usually the floppy, then cdrom, then hard drive, if there is a disk in the floppy or if your pc is set to boot from cdrom and there is a disc in it - it will say OS not found.
The second possible cause is something has happened to windows - either the hard drive has failed or windows has lost it's startup files. If the drive appears to be normal and chatters slightly on startup ( a light clicking noise) then possibly running the original windows install disc and reinstallin windows should fix the problem, on 98 or ME you can re-install, on 2000 or XP try the recover/repair option first.

try to boot the computer using the recovery disc in it, sounds like some operating system files are gone or corrupted, booting from the disc should reinstall the os, or the missing files, but it will check for hardware problems anyways......hope this helps...shia

Hi but sound silly but have you a brightness control anywhere on laptop try adjusting that...otherwise black screens= replacement parts!!

Unfortunately the OS got corrupted and you need to re install the Operating system. There is no other way to fix the problem but use the recovery disc.
If you dont have a recovery disc you may want to contact the manufacturer of your laptop and order one.
Or if you can use a retail version of Operating system and once finished installing you may need to download the drivers of your laptop on the support site.
Hope this helps.

os not found usually means that your hd is faulty.
try remove hd and reseat it.
if no joy have os disk(windows) in cd drive start pc and boot from disk.
select install windows...system checks drive and informs of existing os..want to continue...install windows...next screen shows partitions.choose to delete partition then create new then format and install.
if when u try to boot from disk system say no hd found then hd is damaged.