You had installed Linux and now you want to go back to Windows Vista / XP / 2000. But all you get is an “Error Loading Operating System” after the first part of the Windows installer has finished transferring files? Here’s how to fix this error:
Solution 1:
Go to the BIOS settings of your computer. Change the translation method used to access the hard drive from the default setting “Auto” to “Large” (not LBA, not CHS!). Reboot and with some luck installation will pick up at the point where it aborted before. If it doesn’t continue with the second part of the installation, you have to start over and do a fresh install. Leave the BIOS setting at “Large” for that task!
Note: There really *are* cases where you *have* to do a fresh install after changing the BIOS setting to “Large”. However, it doesn’t hurt to first try whether XP will finish the previous install ;-) Now the only thing I would really like to know is: Why is it, that just Microsoft’s operating systems seem to have this problem? Every Linux distribution I installed on the very same machine didn’t have any problems whatsoever with the “Auto” setting. And to be fair: nor has Windows 98 ;-) And I really wonder why it is so hard for Microsoft to post the actual fix on their support pages instead of the blah that’s written there.
Incoming search terms:
- error loading operating system
- error loading operating system windows 7
- errorsloading operation system
- error loading operation system
- loading operation system
- error loading operating system vmware
- vmware error loading operating system
- vmplayer error loading operating system
- vmware player error loading operating system
- ERROR LOAD OPERATION SYSTEM
Thanks for the reply Stefan..
I will look for the BIOS’ boot sector protection. Can you tell me where it is exactly located? Sorry this is my first time altering BIOS settings. Also. I read there were few people here doing FIXMBR command before FIXBOOT, do I need to that too since I am going directly to fixboot command.
And lastly, yes, I will try to look for a windows recovery with anti virus. I believe this will sove the problem, its just a matter on how Im going to perform it.
Thanks again!
hi
I’m running a “PCV V1/G Sony Vaio” desktop. hard disk: 120GB
I’ve tried changing the settings on the BIOS but all i got was that the drives failed. I’ve been running XP on this computer for over 2 years but this morning the “blue screen O.D” appeared, restarted the computer and now I have no access to any of my files and cannot lose them.I’ve had the blue screen before but managed to repair it with some fix on the internet but now that my computer won’t let me on im stuck in the dark. I don’t think i still have the original CD’s.
Help!
Thanks.
mine is called pheonix bios it chrashes and retstarts just before logon widow comes on curently not sure of model I can not find how to change from auto to large
I have read through the 453 messages above and am still perplexed as to how to access the BIOS settings on my computer.
The computer is a DEll Dimension 8200 with a Western Digital cavalier 80 GB drive. Without any notable changes to its configuration, the computer has stopped functioning after displaying the DELL sign on start up. I do hear the hard drive continuously clicking though before and after the “Error loading operating machine” message is displayed. I can get to the set up utility (F2) but there does not seem to be any option to change the BIOS settings.
Any suggestions would be much appreeciated.
Marc
Well, if there’s a lot more “clicking” from the hard drive than what you’re used to, chances are that the drive simply broke. Thus, the system is no longer able to read the sectors required to boot the operating system and that’s why it displays “Error Loading Operating System”. The easiest way to find out is to remove the drive and attach it to another machine and see what happens there. Likewise, you can attach another drive to your machine and see whether it’ll boot from that one. Other than that I can only direct you to the online help pages from Dell to resolve the BIOS mystery. There’s a chance that Dell, too, switched to providing a special setup CD to access all features whereas the <f2> option only gives you a limited subset.
Hey, this error message suddenly popped up after my computer crashed. I activated a program and it made my comp freeze. I restarted and i get this problem. I’ve never seen this before and my computer was running very well beforehand. I’ve tried the “Large” setting but it doesn’t seem to work. my BIOS is only v2.51.
if you have any idea how to fix this it would be great. My comp is running with window’s XP, Pentium IV 2.8, geforce 6600, motherboard asus P4P8X SE
I have read the info and comments, but my problem seems to be a slight variation of the above. I have an ABIT-KN8 MotherBoard with an AMD Athlon 64 Bit processor, running Windows XP Service Pack 2, 32 bit. The problem I am experiencing is that the computer only recognizes half of the actual RAM. I have PC3200 (Patriot) DIMMs, two of them 1GB each (2X512) but when I test each DIMM separately, the computer only recognizes 512 on each for only 1GB. What is happening and how do I fix it.
Thanks much for caring.
Had the problem “error loading operating system” Thought the hard drive was busted and tried 3 other similiar pc’s with same problem. Did the change in the Bios and it worked 1st time.
Thnx alot.
Regards
Tafseer
I’m yet to design my site. I bought the space & domain name in April, but coudnt find one to help me in designing it.
You are doing a great job. Its nice to know that there are people as nice as you. I wish you all that you wish for yourself & may all your wishes comes true!!!!
Sqn Ldr Raman K Jhanjee
man i cant thank you enough my ecs nforce4m-a just ran out of warrinty when i got the dreaded error message error loading operating system i went rite to my cloned back up hd and had same message tryd to load up fresh xp same thing etc etc etc u rule dude thank u thank u thank u sincerly mike lear yur newest and biggest fan
Hi,
I am fixing a computer, (no brand). The bios is an Phoenix Award. The original HD was giving problems a 40gb ide WD. So I treid to do a syst chck using winxp. didn’t work. So i went and bought a ata 250 HD seagate. My bios does not see it. Not even the old 40gb WD. i trid using auto detect, lba, large… nothing works… any ideas?
Hello my grandparents are having problems with there computer. I believe they got a virus so I formatted NTFS quick and full and got most of the way through the install and had file not found errors. When I restarted the install had completely different file not found errors. After a few times I am now stuck on the error loading operating system screen everytime. I dont know what mobo theyre using. The question is i put a hard drive in that already had xp loaded to see if it would boot to that and still the same thing. So does xp save something in the bios that it maybe just didnt recognize the other hard drive?? Or could I have other issues affecting the computer. I do know that theyre running a western digital 40 gb and the one I tried was a seagate 40 gb. I will try changing to large if you think it will still help. Thanks for all your help.
hey! stefan thank you! i found your post and the comments very useful.
here´s my experience, which will prove useful for k7n2 and samsung 80gb hdd owners installing windows xp:
-old hd died.
-i buy new samsung sp0842n
-put it in, put windows xp cd
-”error loading operating system”
and kept trying what you said and nothing
what solved the problem:
in bios -> standard -> hdd : MANUAL (no autodetection and this is not ” autodect hdd”, the other one
then hdd mode: large
then start win xp install all over again, from creating the partition. (delete the old one if you created and got the e.l.o.s. message)
so, i hope that it helps you reader.
these are the stuff that make windows and microsoft shitty. not only using it, but installing is pain pain pain. in the time it took me to put all this together and install it i would have set up 10 debian boxes.
Just for the record. If you get ‘error loading operating system’ after ‘downgrading’ (is it…?) from Vista to XP, there’s a good chance FIXMBR will help. Vista seems to mess up the master boot record.
Had this issue with a Gentoo Linux install, changing the disk type to “ATAPI (other)” fixed the problem. I think the issue is more LBA-related than anything else.
wow supper heros arn’t just in comic books they actually exist on the internet.
i was gona jump off a bridge over this problem, you saved me after sezveral days of pulling hair out. lol
I tried the “large” thing but diddnt thinck about retrying instalation after. didnt know what it ment, was just tryin everythin in Bios. was goin mental.
thanks loads :-)
Hi, I am also getting the error loading operating system after formatting. I have changed the hard drive mode to large in the bios and formatted again but its still the same. This pc was running on xp before with no probs i just wanted to clear out the junk!!!
I have a gigabyte GA-81915PM motherboard and a 200 gig seagate hard drive.
I have wasted a whole weekend trying to resolve this so any help greatly appreciated.
Many thanks! I was trying to install XP on a new 320G Seagate Baracuda SATA drive with an Asus M2N-Plus SLI “Vista Edition” (whatever the f**k that means) motherboard. The “Large” setting in the CMOS fixed the problem.
Hi,
I’m getting the same error message that you had, but not when installing windows. See, I already installed Windows XP. This morning when I started the PC, I got that error message on a black screen.
Can I apply the same fix as you did in the BIOS?
Should I do something different?
Thanks in advance,
Marc.
Since you got the error from out of nowhere chances are your machine either caught a boot sector virus or the boot sector got destroyed by an accident. Either way you should try to boot from your XP install CD/DVD and use the “Repair” options being offered there. This should fix your problem.
Thanks Stefan,
I’ll try that.
What about MBR fix?
Would that help?
Thanks,
Marc
Hi,
I’m getting the same error message that you had, but not when installing windows.
Ι thought a driver was installing and cause the problem…
I entered BIOS went to IDE controllers and changed from “AUTO” to “USER”. But there are two options i can change. Its PIO MODE and DMA. I tried it but nothing works out.
My motherboard:
———-
Manufacturer Intel Corporation
Model D845WN
I only want to copy some files that I need from this hard disk. Is there a way to do that?
Also when I put this hard drive as “slave” in a pc, windows recognize the hard drive but i dont have access to it! It says “Disk is not formatted”
What should I do?
hello all,
i have pentium4 , my mother board name is: EP-5HDA3+ i get the error loading O.S.
what i have to do by this EPOX motherboard , is it the same ?
Hey, thanks a million for this blog, my stuff works :). Who knows how long it would have taken me to figure that one out on my own. My MB is and EliteGroup NF650iSLIT-A.
Hi There, quiet amazing to see how long ago this thread was started and still very useful. Right my problem is that once I’ve changed the settings to LARGE the keyboard stop responding and therefore render the saving of that setting impossible. I have tried NORMAL and that didn’t any difference, I don’t dare doing LBA yet. It’s a old HP BRIO (I like it because is quiet) PIII 600mghz can’t see the motherboard specs.
Hey i read throught quite a bit of this blog and i changed to the large acces mode in my bios and reinstalled windows it gets to a 100% and says “Windows cannot format the drive it may be damaged” but i know its not damaged i bought it yesterday and tried 2 other harddrives a 40 a 30 and my new 120GB WD any ideas? please help..
Make sure you have SP2 and run CHKDSK.
Thanks for helping me to solve the problem, and one interesting fact-Changing in BIOS from Auto to Large didn’t destroy the existing data on HDD.
I tried the above fix on an ECS 755-A2(V1.0)Socket 754 (AMD) with NO success. I then flashed the BIOS to (V1.1b) and still NO luck…
Finally I tore open the box and noticed that both the HDD and CD-ROM were on the same IDE controller, with the HDD set as master and the CD-ROM set as slave. I moved the CD-ROM to the second IDE controller and set them both as master and VOILA! I think this problem is along the same lines as “Diana” from Solution (II), where having a 40-pin cable instead of an 80-pin cable caused the problem. Either way I got it working and thought I’d share my solution with everyone.
Thanks so much. It worked.
eMachines T2895 mobo MSI ms-6714
(del) key to enter bios setup
(enter) to go into standard (first group)
(down arrow) until hd name is highlighted
(enter) to see hd info, at bottom is access type, set to large (was auto)
had to restart setup deleting-creating partition and formatting, then win xp hm setup was flawless.
danke ser
so….., for bios with only “auto/disable” option still can not fix the problem right?
*sigh*
You can add the MSI K7N2GM2-LSR to the list of affected motherboards.
I encountered this same issue when trying to install my new 500gb SATA drive.
Initially it seemed all was well, drive was recognized by BIOS and the Western Digital utility had no trouble ghosting my old drive. But when I tried to reboot, would just get an ‘Error Loading Operating System’.
I followed the advice of setting the mode from ‘Auto’ to ‘Large’. I then got a ‘Error reading Disk’ on boot so then I had to re-copy the drive, but afterwards all was well and I was able to boot successfully from the new drive.
Thanks for the tip!!
i experience this problem when downgrading from Vista to XP. after first reboot after copying instalation file, my HD got this error.
i have mobo that only have bios with only “auto/disable”. i have try a lot of things to resolve that problem but still no luck.
last night….
i take off the HD into another computer with win XP and Partition Magic 8.0 installed,then delete and create new primary partition and format (NTFS) with that program, then put it back into my comp, installing XP……. and… VIOLA…. it’s works, no more Error Loading OS ……..thanks to Partition Magic 8.0 !!!!!
Asrock 775DUAL VSTA with Maxtor 250GB SATA + Maxtor 120GB IDE.
all work like charms……
Good Luck.
· UPDATE 29/08/2007
· AOPEN QF50D BLACK 350W
· MSI K9N NEO-F V3
· AMD DUALCORE 4400+ BOXED
· NVIDIA NX8400GS 256MB PCI-E
· LANCARD ON BOARD
· SOUNDCARD ON BOARD
· 1GB 800MHZ DDR2
· SEAGATE 160GB 8MB S-ATAII
· DVDWRITER 18X DUAL LAYER
· DVD NEC
1: firstly I install xp everything goes as it must,
2: the opstarten of xp walks wrong off: Mistake during drawers of
operating system
I got what I needed to know from you that saved me probably hours of frustration and work. Your efforts should be commended as they are offered with little or nothing in return. Again thanx…
Paul
Hello.. I have a Leveno x60, i was able to get into the “bois setup utility” but cant find any setting to set to “large” my bios version is 1.09 (7JET24WW). Please help.. thanks.
Okwito
Just give a try with Partition Magic 8.0….
delete all partition, create new one then format again in NTFS.
GL
You guys are legends I had to use LBA method, thnx for getting me back up on my feet.
This thing happened AFTER I flashed the BIOS, ASUS AN8HX (not a direct quote) from v. 502 to 902. Restarted and POOF, no more computer. I can’t even load the Windows Start-Up CD anymore! HELP!
My machine began restarting on its own about a month ago, a couple of times I heard the cpu alarm going off but I never recieced any OS error message, just a message letting me know it recovered from a serius problem. I cleaned out the spy ware, Checkdisked it, defragged it, cleaned out the fans, removed the processor and cleaned it, it is now running better and restarts less frequently however it still does restart. I purchased another Samsung 516DDR ram card wich raised it to 1024mb and when I fired it up all it does is restart over and over. I removed the new card so I can use it again. any help with this would be greatly appreciated
XP Home Edit ser pk 2
emachine W3080 AMD XP3000+ 2.16 GHz
MSI(ms6734) Samsung 516mb DDR
I have bought and assembled a new system around 6 months back and it was working properly.
And suddenly 2 months back it stopped working with the black screen saying “Error Loading
Operating System”. Then after trying lot of things, i have formatted my hard drive but that
didnt resolve the issue. Then after debuggind a lot, somehow i found that there is some
problem with BIOS, I have removed the CMOS and then inserted to set the default settings and
the problem resolved. And again now after some days, i am again having the same error.
Don’t know what the problem is. I have also tried to change the Access mode, but unable to
find tha place where we can do this.
One important thing is, i didn’t faced this issue while installing Windows Xp. It was
suddenly happened.
System Configuration is:
BIOS Version: TS94610J.86A.0047.2006.0911.0110
Desktop Mother Board Information
Mother Board: Intel
Product Name: D9466ZIS
Product Version: AAD66165-302
Serial No.: LAIS702004T0
Drive Configuration: ST3160211AS – 160 GB
Its very frustrating now…And yes one more thing my system is still under warrenty but i am not sure whether to send it to the manufacturer or do something by myself??
PLease advice something..Every response will be heartly appreciated.
Please do help.
Hi Stefan,
Please advice something as it is very frustrating 4 the last 2-3 months.
I am eagerly waiting 4 ur response.
Thanks,
Amusing. I got to this site by searching for the dread message because it occurred while trying to install Fedora. Then I find out it can only happens to Windows suckers and NEVER happens to Linux users!
Thanks dude. Been searching for the solution for hours. Had already tried setting the HD to large, but never reinstalled. D’oh!
Thanks again.
Hi,
A family member of mine, was given a computer and I was wondering if you could help me.
The computer is a Dell Dimension 4550 series, Intel Pentium 4, Windows XP, 2 Ghz, 512k integrated,.
When you turn on the computer has the Dell page then there is a black screen and it says “Error loading operating system”. I input the Windows XP reinstallation CD, but nothing happens. I turned off the computer manually and when I restarted it, on the screen there is the F2 key for system setup, but couldn’t find anything. I also tried F12 and it shows the Boot Device menu and I tried some of the options there, but the same error would appear. I don’t know what else to do.
I would appreciate your help. Thanks
Guys, sorry for being late but I’ve been on vacation ;)
@Sean: Your problem sounds like something went wrong during the BIOS upgrade. The only advice I can give is to look for someone selling replacement BIOS chips in your area.
@Brian: From your description I’d say your problem is either a faulty RAM chip (try replacing the current one with the new one you bought) or a defect on the main board.
@Sumit: My best guess is that your problem is related to some sort of virus or other malware which is overwriting the boot sector on your hard drive. Another possibility would be a weak CMOS battery causing the settings to fail after some time. Since resetting the CMOS to default values cured your system I don’t think changing the access mode will be a permanent solution for you. Having the system inspected seems the better choice to me.
hello!
im using a NFORCE3-A version 1.0A motherboard, AMD2600+ processor, 512mb pc400 ddr memory, 128mb 64bit agp video card..
the problem is, after copying the setup files and the system reboots, it didnt go to the xp setup where its starting to install program files and everything.. it only starts again to the setup from the very beginning..
i already did changed the access mode to large..choices are CHS, LBA, Large, and Auto.. but it doesn’t seem to work..
used to have an installed win xp sp2 to that machine when it started to start failing loading windows.. i started to fix it best way i know from repairing, to reformatting to, well now the choices that you guys have given… but its still not working..
what you recons the prob.. have 2 same motherboards and the other ones working just fine now.. although seems that to those motherboards im only having problems..
anyway.. any suggestions i would try, it would be a very big help for me..
tnx so much and have more power!
Stefan, Thanks for your advice, I have already sent the new card back before the 30day return policy was up, however I found a local shop that would let me bring my tower in and install one of their cards while I’m there, incase I have the same problem. Thanks again, and I hope your vacation was a pleasant one. God Bless
Brian
I have a Sony Avio and been getting the same message as others “error loading operating system” and I have no idea what to do. from reading this forum, I cant even change my BIOs, I didnt install a other operating system so I dont know what might have happen, maybe a virus. However, I do not want to lose my files so is there a way I can fix this problem with losing the files!! Please help me :(
Thanks for the solution. Changed to Large and could install XP perfectly.