Sounds like either a dead hard drive, the OS/bootloader somehow got corrupted or your computer is by default booting to the wrong hard drive.
You could try swapping the boot devices around, if you have two hard drives swap them round (in the BIOS) and reboot. This happened to me the other day, for some reason my PC decided to start booting from the hard drive where I keep my downloads, backups and Steam folder.
If swapping the boot order around doesn't work you can attempt to fix the boot loader (if that's even the problem) by booting your Windows 7 / Vista DVD, letting it load and selecting startup repair. That's an easy way to fix boot loader problems.
It's a bit more complicated if you are on XP though.
@organicalistic_: To boot directly from the DVD you usually press F8 (on most motherboards) then you should get a list to select what you want to boot from, just pick the drive your disc is in, should be fairly easy to tell which one it is.
If you mean swapping the hard drives around boot wise then have a dig through the BIOS and you'll probably find something called "boot device priority" or something like that, it'll be a list most likely with for example; hard drive 1, hard drive 2, floppy drive, cd drive and it'll attempt to boot from each of those until it finds something that it can boot from. Either that or it'll only attempt to boot from one drive and then call it quits and give you the OS missing error. (which is what mine does)
" Sounds like either a dead hard drive, the OS/bootloader somehow got corrupted or your computer is by default booting to the wrong hard drive. You could try swapping the boot devices around, if you have two hard drives swap them round (in the BIOS) and reboot. This happened to me the other day, for some reason my PC decided to start booting from the hard drive where I keep my downloads, backups and Steam folder. If swapping the boot order around doesn't work you can attempt to fix the boot loader (if that's even the problem) by booting your Windows 7 / Vista DVD, letting it load and selecting startup repair. That's an easy way to fix boot loader problems. It's a bit more complicated if you are on XP though. "
Best thing you can do is boot from the windows disk and startup repair.
Attempting anything suggested here you will end up bricking your computer, it would be better to call in somebody who knows what they are doing if startup repair does not work.
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