error loading operating system

Solouko · 17 Jan 2006 at 08:49

a friend of mine is having trouble installing windows XP, after he's formatted the disk and XP's loaded all the files and it reboots, insted of going into loading windows and the setup screen it just comes up with an error message "error loading operating system"

any ideas why?

UKDTweak · 17 Jan 2006 at 08:53

Is your hard drive a SATA disk ? did you load the drivers from floppy during the xp startup ?

Solouko · 17 Jan 2006 at 09:22

i'm pretty sure its and IDE drive and XP's been loaded from an XP CD-ROM
without looing at the comp personaly i cant give you accurate details, i just need possible causes for him to try

subxero · 17 Jan 2006 at 11:04

Sometimes under the right circumstances if the PC has been clocked when installing XP it will fail to install the drivers correctly, I have seen this first hand before

Solouko · 17 Jan 2006 at 13:04

His comp’s not been clocked yet, and I don’t think he’s planning to, a friend of mine (different friend) suggested that it might be a memory problem as when installing XP the system files are installed to and run from the preloaded memory on the first reboot so how would you test the memory without having an OS? Something that can be loaded from a boot CD-ROM (I can make one of them)

subxero · 17 Jan 2006 at 17:45

Memtest, do a search for it on google

Dennisthemenace · 18 Jan 2006 at 00:30

Try downloading CDSpeed from the nero website and check out the XP disk itself for errors.

Ken · 18 Jan 2006 at 00:47

This may help...
http://whocares.de/archive/000682.php#001009