Operating system not found error :-(

[pamela1]

I had this error and since have bought and installed a new WD carviar HD and also a new CDrom...I tried installing XP pro and it will only install so far and stops.It stops right before the actual window appears that it is actually installing Windows. If you reboot(with CD removed)..the orginal error message"operating sys blah blah" is back. I have no clue what I am doing wrong. Any help would awesome...Thanks....Pamela

[ski]

Are the hard drive and CD-ROM drive properly jumpered, and recognized in BIOS?

Is the hard drive partioned and formatted?

[Sylvander]

1. How to make a free “Smart Boot Manager” floppy
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41498
This makes it easier to boot a chosen drive [particularly the one holding the EBCD]. This will show whether your CD-drive is detected as available as a boot drive.

2. How to make a free EBCD bootable CD
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41485
This has a number of useful utilities included including "Image" [for DOS, by Terabyte] & "File Manager". If this CD boots successfully on this drive or that, is not a bad test of its functional ability. The two disks make a good team.

I figure that rather than installing Windows from a CD in a drive that has a rather changeable drive letter designation, it's better to...

a) Partition the HDD with a [FAT32] partition other than the boot partition, where you can hold the installation files [save backups there too using "Image"] and install from there, then leave them there. Thus, when Windows needs a file it will fetch it in an instant. You don't have the trouble of Windows asking for the Windows CD, that must be in an optical drive with the same letter as the one from which the initial installation took place. Sometimes that drive letter has been allocated to a totally different drive, that's no longer available, so the CD cannot be put in an optical drive with that letter!

b) I show, at the bottom of the EBCD thread, how to use "Volkov Commander" [or "File Manager"] on the EBCD to copy the installation files to a partition on the HDD and run the installation from there.
They can also display the contents of your HDD so you can confirm what is on there.

Killdisk = www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm [free]
This will detect and display the details of your HDD and it's partitions.
It will also zero-fill either the whole HDD or any of the partitions on it that you choose.

Ultimate Boot CD = www.ultimatebootcd.com [free]
This includes lots of different HDD manufacturers utilities for partitioning and formatting [among lots of other utilities].

[Paul Komski]

I'm going to suggest that both the CDROM and the HDD are recognised as such in the BIOS since the installation begins OK and gets "so far".

Is this a SATA or PATA Caviar? ... and what capacity? ... and does the WinXP pro include SP1 or SP2 or neither?

Suggest you start over (depending on the answers to the preceeding paragraph) after zeroing the whole drive. Killdisk as per Sylvander's link should do this for you.

If that doesnt work you can copy the installation files to the HDD as per Sylvander's suggestion but since the setup is then non-standard you need to know what to do. The whole i386 folder must be copied from the installation CD and winnt.exe (not setup.exe) run from the copied i386 folder using DOS on a boot floppy or boot CD.

[pamela1]

Hey Thanks !!!! I really do appreciate the help and will try all your suggestions. Pamela