error loading operating system

[cbarn1119]

Not sure if I am even posting in the right place, but I will give this a shot. Background is this... I managed to somehow get a boot drive virus, so I decided to trash the old hard drive and get a new one. I got a western digital EIDE 320GB I set my jumpers and put my disk in which I bought through my school and had previously installed on my old hard drive. everything seemed fine until it got to about 16% formatting and it shut down. It now won't boot from the disk. It just keeps telling me error loading operating system. I have pushed every f key to no effect. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated by my family. They are getting tired of my cussing!

[Paul Komski]

and had previously installed on my old hard driveYou had better expand on the make/model of related hardware and PC and on the operating system in use. Is this a drive with an operating system on it that you are simply trying to migrate from one PC to another? If so then that seldom works. You may need to repair the old installation, to wipe the drive and clean install an OS onto it and your hardware/software may or may not support drives larger than 128GiB/137GB.

Could this drive also be infected with a boot sector virus and could the drive be on the point of failure. Checking it with the maker's own diagnostics (on a CD to avoid infections via floppy diskette) might be a good idea.