I just posted this to my company's internal knowledge base.. I thought I would pass it on to you folks in case you have this issue.

I had to google hard, high and low until my head hurt to find the answer, so I wanted to also make it easier for me to find the solution again by also submitting it to here

FYI this applies to all OS's, including WindowsXP *ducking*

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ARTICLE SUMMARY:
"Error loading operating system" at BIOS bootup screen (WinXP, Linux, Unix)

SYMPTOMS:
I think I nuked the boot sector of the HD, or maybe the HD crashed... This applies to WinXP, Linux, Unix, all OS's.

RESOLUTION:
Tim Smith, 10/5/04

I tried installing WinXP again, fixmbr, restore consolr, etc etc.. even installed Debian, FreeBSD, SuSE, made it all FAT32, nuked it, made NTFS, made it reiser,ext2, ext3 everything, NOTHING worked, I kept getting "error loading operating system" no matter what OS I "successfully" installed. I even used knoppix 3.6 to nuke things and repartition and format to no avail.

Don't despair there is probably good news!

The most likely solution is that your HD geometry is set wrong... On many motherboards in the BIOS setting for your HD, it is set to AUTO.. which sometimes tries to use CHS which is incorrect for most modern computers. Manually set it to LBA instead.

You may have to reformat your HD completely after manually setting the HD to LBA. I hear that you might even need to go to your HD website to download a low level formatting utility (writes 0's all across your drive). I fortunately did not have to do that.

This problem mainfested only after heavy hacking around trying Norton Ghost, Partition Magic, different Unix, Linux, Windows XP operating system, and I guess that the instability of the geometry being set wrong finally crapped out on me. Before this, it had been running only WinXP for more than 2 years with no burp!

LBA is your friend. No to AUTO, no to CHS.

Thanks to this site I found after HEAVY googling and screening out all the XP's fixmbr and fdisk /mbr suggestions that didnt help:

http://www.aoaforums.com/forum/archi...p/t-24853.html

Whew.

setting to LBA, and then ghosting from image file to the boot partition (Its a dual boot, and that happens to be winxp :P ) and I was all set to go.

HTH some of you poor saps that got yourself into the same bind I did..

excellent information. this really helped me out. it may also help to make sure that the drive with the OS loads before other hard drives.

1 members found this post helpful.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

You have saved me so much bother it's unbelievable. Very good of you to post this solution. Cannot possibly thank you enough.

I realise this was posted quite some time ago but thank you very very much indeed.

Excuse me while I go and do some cartwheels!

Hi

This rumour that it is BIOS / HDD issue is not true
What is true is that it is a issue of HDD geometry

The issue is what is written to the HDD not BIOS

This is proven by the fact that I got 6 new HDD's Same make model and batch. I created the fault on one drive. I then installed XP onto a second and third HDD both of which worked absolutely perfect.

I then cloned the DUD install onto the working HDD guess what the error was reproduced proving that the issue is actually what is written to the HDD.

To prove that it is NOT a HDD fault and is only what is written to the HDD I cloned the 3rd HDD that was working perfectly back to 1st & 2nd HDD

All three drives then booted and worked perfectly

This establishes the "error loading operating system" is a function only of what is written to the HDD, it is not a HDD or BIOS issue at all.

Anything said to the contrary is a myth or just misinformation by the uninformed or uneducated or random luck.

As to what is written to the drive and what to change in general the following has been proven on the drive that was produced with the error

1 The partitions were all accessible no error
2 The files were all accessible no errors
3 FixBoot & FixMbr just does not fix the problem
4 BootCfg /Rebuild just does not fix the problem
5 SystemRoot c:\windows did not fix this problem

Now in summary
We do know its NOT a BIOS or HDD fault
We do know its a software problem written to HDD
We do know that it can be fixed by overwriting
We know FDISK on XPBOOT from BootDisk.com does not work its Win98 & makes it worse (wrong version)

What I can tell you is cloning the drive with O&O repairs the problem on the target HDD if you say yes to the question "the original appears bootable do you want the target to be bootable Yes / No"

What I don't have yet is quick fix that works, I will test any serious suggestions for solution

Kind Regards
Phillip

Wow... blast from the past... This post helped me fix my borked system when it was posted.

Thank you all, this gave me the clue to solving a problem I had after I removed an unused partition. The software I used reported the disk geometry was incorrect and inisted on fixing it first.

After that, the machine wouldn't boot, with that error.

Having tried changing settings in the BIOS unsuccessfully, I slaved the disk and a new disk to a working PC and I created new partitions on the new disk and copied over the files using the command line from the original hard disk to the new one. That ensured that whatever was written wrongly on the original hard disk was not copied over, just the files themselves. The new hard disk worked fine. The original hard disk was reused after wiping. I also re-wrote the MBR on the new disk using a UBCD4WIN disk, though there are other ways.

The command I used on a windows pc was:

xcopy x: y: /e/c/f/h/r/k/x/y

(where x was the source partition and y was the destination)

Although this was a problem with windows XP, I guess the same procedure would work with any other O/S including Linux, hence posting my success here, the key point being to copy the files invidivually, thus avoiding copying the incorrect geometry.

HTH

Brian

I had an interesting similar case recently. My headless Proxy Server/SeedBox was running TinyXP on a rickety old Celeron 400 (or something like that) with a few hundred megs of RAM.

I decided that I could spare an Nforce3 mobo that I had laying around with an Athlon 64 3000+ and 2 gigs of DDR to make it able to support more torrents at a time (and more responsive when remoting into it).

The OS/Software config was delicate and complicated. I really didn't want to reinstall everything. Before yanking the hard drive, I changed the IDE controller driver to a generic one so that it wouldn't blue screen booting on a new controller, but I still hit the "Error Loading Operating System" on the new motherboard, no matter what I did.

I finally realized that the dilapidated old mobo had used CHS geometry for the HDD, and that's how it was formatted. The newer board was set to "auto" and using LBA. I manually forced it back to CHS, booted up, did a repair install with the TinyXP disk (for safety's sake), and updated all of the drivers.

My SeedBox ZOOMS now, and I didn't have to reinstall/reconfigure everything!

ToBe's fix did it for me. I was in the same shape with a computer that I could get Gparted and DSL (Knoppix) up on, but could not get XP to load and run with the could not find OS error.

In my CMOS setting I had to set PIO from Auto to LBA. and it's loading right now.

Thanks!