While installing windows XP I got the message "Error Loading Operating
System" after the system files had been copied and it was time to
reboot.
I searched high and low in the newsgroups and found that many people
had the same problem, often with a hard drive that was previously in
some other computer or used to have a linux installation on it (like
mine did).
Microsoft's support pages are worthless. The problem was not with my
very new bios, or my CMOS or anything, it was that the single
partition on my hard drive was not "active" because it used to contain
a linux installation.
I spent an evening dicking with hard drive parameters in my bios. That
just made things worse. The best I could do was "Error Loading
Operating System".
So, if you are having this problem, go now and download
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html
Make a bootable floppy or CDROM with it, and set your partition to
active.
I just deleted all data partitions and then viewed the MBR and made
sure the top line said "active" next to it.
After that, Windows XP installed like it should.
My question to Microsoft is: why don't you do this as part of the
install?
There's a FIXBOOT and FIXMBR as part of the recovery console. Why do
neither of these fix this problem? (What's the difference anyway?)
Back in the day I could have probably fixed this with fdisk, instead I
had to use a feature-laden gui multi-boot program.
I hope this information helps someone else out there.
