Argh!

I'm running a s370 rig trying to install Windows 2000 Pro on it, it goes through the first part of the install, but when it gets to the part where it has to reboot, it keeps giving me "Error loading operating system"

What do I do?

 

If you have a spare HDD hanging around, I would try installing on that to rule that out as a problem.

 

There's no problems with the hard drive.

 

All I was thinking, was that in the first part of the install it writes files to the HDD, which comlpetes succesfully, so it suggests that it is Ok. But then when you go to boot from the HDD, it fails, so it suggests a problem with the HDD.

You could check the boot order in BIOS....

Or try booting from a Windows bootable floppy disk and make sure you can access the HDD from there... (You can download NTFS for DOS if you formatted the drive with NTFS...)

 

Drive works perfectly fine as a backup drive, I've formatted it with Partition Magic and with the command prompt, ran diskcheck, no errors found, but when I try to format it when I'm trying to install the OS on it, it hangs at around 7%. Meh, at the price of hard drives nowdays, might as well bin it and buy new.

Cheers anyhow.

 

If it was a secondary drive in the machine where you used partition magic to set it up there are a couple of things to check...

Are the jumper settings correct now it is the master drive?

Was it a primary partition you set up or an extended? (extended are not bootable).

If you don't need any of the data on the disk, re create all the partition information in the first part of Windows set up by deleting all existing partitions and recreating just one primary partition.

You may need to rewrite the master boot record. Boot from a Windows floppy and use fdisk to rewrite the MBR.

(Note that any of the above will wipe all data from the disk).

 

Tried all of the above and it just seems to be fubar, shame the warranty ran out a few months ago!

 

Ah well, these things happen.

One last thing to try, would be to put it back in the first machine, and see if you can access it there again...

 

Its most likely that the Boot sector on the hard disk is curropt and have bad sectors. So its prob only good as a second drive from now on.

As using it as a second drive the boot sector is not used or needed and the rest the drive prob be fine.

 

Could it not be the Win 2k disk? I've had a backup CD-R go mad, the files copied fine, but the OS simply wasn't playing ball.

 

you cold try installing a different OS, a linux distro or some thing to rule out the w2k disc?