ARG!!! error loading operating system

[ares350]

so I did all this before, blah blah blah, computer wouldnt load OS. during bootup it says error loading OS(see attached image).

so... I figure, something aint working right, I dont know what, so I RMA EVERYTHING. CPU, mobo, VIDcard, and new ram. so... we know its not a hardware issue.

only thing from the initial system is hard drive, PSU, and cdrom. hard drive worked fine as a slave in another system. cdrom will run the first half of XP install.

the mobo, vid card were replaced. cpu was tested by excalibur PC and found to run at stock speeds. which is what it should be at right now. BUT, when I go into the bios, it says current speed 800mhz... fsb is 133 which is right, and multiplier is on auto, but 800mhz? multiplier should be 13.5 not 6...

ignoring that, I boot from CD. xp install proceeds. it creates partition, format, then copies files, restart, after restart if I click any key to boot from cd, it repeats the same thing, if I dont hit anything, it says error loading OS.

what am I doing wrong? :cry:

heres a pic of it kinda. the camera battery is dead, so I got one shot and it died, obviously its horribly out of focus, but I can tell you that last line says

Press any key to boot from CD..........(I push nothing)Error loading operating system

[Turd Furguson]

Your pic is way too blurry.

Is your cd scratched?
Have you tried load setup defaults in the BIOS?

[ares350]

yes I tried that, and clearing the cmos ect.

tried multiple XP CDs.

I think its a mobo bios problem, a google search turned up alot of threads.

my new plan is to try a win 98 boot disk to format, then install win 98, and upgrade to winXP after that. apparently this is the only thing that works for everyone else, hopefully itll work for me.

[Turd Furguson]

Wow never seen something like this b4.

[ares350]

windows 98 loads and runs fine.

now supposedly xp upgrade should then upgrade and work. no such luck for me though.

[Stee]

i think the most obvious issue is;

you rmd everything (which is really ****ty to do to be honest). the issue however is more than likely to be from your harddrive,cdrom or psu. which you said are remaining.

just because the harddrive works as a slave, and that the cdrom loads part of the disk, doesnt realisticaly mean their fine. id check your wiring, make sure the cdrom and harddrive are on the right ide channels, and on an ide channel of their own. check your power wiring, altho i doubt itll make that big of a difference. then try a different cdrom drive. last thing would be another harddrive. or try formatting that harddrive afew times (not using quick format). ive had a drive 'crash' before simular to this (wouldnt let the os install after a set point during setup) it resolved itself after numerous formats.

[Sophisticated]

is the drive your installing on Sata or IDE??? if sata you should press F6 when it tells you when booting from XP CD...also make sure you have your Sata drive the second to boot after CD-Rom in BIOS....if IDE make sure your jumpers are set for the Master and in the bios make sure it is reconized as the master also...give the CD-rom it's own IDE cable and give the harddrive it's own IDE cable see what you can dow ith this..hope this helps

[ares350]

its an IDE hard drive, but it did load and run windows 98 100%. so I assume that rules out hardware error, somewhere along the line I have conflict with XP.

[ares350]

this is just a post to update my resolution for anyone with a future problem finding this through a search.

what I ended up doing was getting to dos with a win98 boot disk

fdisk
delete all the partitions.
restart
fdisk/mbr (clears master boot record as well)
format c:
install winxp

now I dont know if it was a combination of something I did, but I ended up formating into a fat32 file system. then during xp install I converted back to NFST.

whatever it was, it worked.