Problems installing xp

A work college of mine seems to be having troubles installing xp on a new Hdd .

A couple of weeks back his old drive gave up and everytime he tried starting the pc he got an error msg saying error loading os . So he went out and bought a brand new one . He loaded up the xp cd , made 2 partitions ( c and d ) and went about formatting c , installed the system files and then the system wants to reboot to continue the new install.

The problem though is when the pc restarts to continue the installation he gets an error msg saying error loading os ?? ( its the same msg as with the old drive ) . The pc then justs sits there and nothing else happens ??


Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing the problems ?



I have done the following : ran chkdsk ( it found some errors and repaired them ) , i checked to make sure that the hdd is in master mode as well.


edit: 2 different xp cds were also tried but the same error each time so i think it might somehow be a hardware problem

Could you give more information on exactly what error message you get?

the msg just says error loading os

At what point?

Is it possible for you to use safemode?

It could be any one of a number of things, he was foolish to assume the hard drive was faulty without trying it in another machine.

Some obvious things to check, if he has the possibility of trying an alternative in his machine or trying his parts in another machine, in order of likelyhood.

1. Psu. If the psu is failing some of the voltages may be below specification. This can also be checked out with a multimeter.
2. Motherboard. All I/O activity goes through here, so failure could affect disk access.
3. Memory. A memory fault could simply make it appear that bad data has been received from the disk.
4. Cpu. As memory.
5. Other add-in card. An add-in card could be sending spurious signals over the I/O bus, at the time the OS is loading. Remove all unnecessary cards to check.

Of course, there is still the possibility that the original hdd failed and another hdd is failing in the same way, but the chances of that are pretty remote.

after i created a new partition , formatted it and loaded the system files for a new install xp says it needs to reboot , the pc shuts off , powers up and then comes this msg : error loading os

I havent tried safe mode yet but because xp hasnt finished installing completly i dont think that would bring anything or am i wrong there ?

Try some of the ideas from lynx. I suggest you remove all unnessasary items as a first thing to try.