Trouble Installing Windows XP Home
 

Ok.. So I got XP Home in the mail today.
Try and guess. Yea, not working.
I put in the CD, format the drive, copy files, lalala all very fine.
Then it says to restart to do second part of installation.
I do that. Then it says, after posting, "Press enter key to boot from CD.. (a few secs pass) Error Loading Operating System."

Ok, so in that few seconds I press enter, and I end up doing the first part of setup all over again. Wtf???
Why the fuck would it do that? I just spent 20 mins copying files and now THIS?? BTW i've done all sorts of tweaks in the booting order and stuff and it still persists.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Comp Specs:
AMD Duron 1.4 Ghz
128MB PC2100 Kingston
Cheap Aspire Case (230 Watts)
40 GB WD HDD (5400 RPM, 2 MB cache)
Asus A7V8X-MX
Onboard sound,video, etc..
Lite-on CDROM
No Floppy (who needs?)

I suspect it has something to do with a faulty drive, like it wont accept a NTFS partition (yes, setup only allows NTFS)

And there's something on the issue on Microsoft.com but you know MS... Nothing on how to resolve the issue (Almost like the time when my HP was not accepting a Radeon 7000 PCI card!!)
Nothing on Asus's website.

first, when you reboot it, try removing the cd so it doesnt interrupt the boot process. Reset your boot order so it is:

1. CDROM
2. Hard Drive
and the others dont matter..

double check all that, format and start again. Installing/reinstalling everything is a necessary evil...

Although, on another note, this does remind me of something that happened to my friend. His sister gave him a computer, so he booted it at my house once, it was very nice, all specced out, and it loaded, Home Edition. I pointed this out and he said:
"It was a gift! What was I supposed to say?:'HOME EDITION??!!!?? FUCK YOU, TAKE IT BACK!!'"
Damn funny at the time.

On another note, you may just want to get Pro. If you are a student you can usually get it for a good deal legally, the adademic version is identical to Pro, and some programming groups on some campuses give winxp Pro away for free.

Either way, good luck with your install.

Zero fill the drive and start again. www.wdc.com and download the data lifeguard tools and make a bootdisk. In here under diagnostics you are able to "write zeros to the drive" do that and I would suspect your problem will go away. Upgrading to XP Pro wont matter in this case.

Rats, I dont have a floppy drive in my new comp, will it be alright if i swap the one in my HP into the new one? just for this time?
BTW- taking the disc out of the drive before rebooting didnt work.

Double check your jumpers....if you dont' have them set correct it might work for a little bit....

I had a problem similar to this. I got the same "Error loading operating system" after it found no bootable CDs (because there were none in the drives). I tried everything to fix the MBR and the bootsector but it didnot work. So I had to format and re-install completely. After reinstalling it booted exactly normal. The only thing different was that I formatted FAT32 not NTFS.

VF19 yes you can swap in a floppy drive and take it out later. The jumpers shouldnt be an issue here as you can load the first part of the OS so windows sees your hdd...and the partition table shouldnt matter either in this case...at least never in my experience )

Man I made a bootable floppy using the WD Lifeguard program but when I put it in the floppy drive in my new comp it doesnt do anything and still says "Error loading Operating System"

What now?

Ok.. I got it working. Im using it now in fact.
I just formatted two partitions into FAT32 instead of NTFS.
Cool deal. Waaay faster than I expected. I have a XP Pro with a 930MHz PIII w/ 192 SDRAM that does maybe half this speed. I think it's the DDR, but its your guess.