So I installed a new motherboard

**healimonster** · 02-27-2005, 08:39 PM

and everthing boots up and is detected in the bios. The mobo is an Abit 1c7-g.

I ran a mem-test and no problems. I put my xp install disk in and it reads the disc and loads up and I was able to go throught all the install screens.

I deleted my old C drive partition, did a new NTFS format, and ran the install. It copied all the files and said I needed to reboot the system. It rebooted and after the system does all of its checks I get the text message

"error loading operating system"

any sugestions?

The drives and cables worked on my last two mobo configuartions.

**Snee** · 02-27-2005, 09:09 PM

Does it boot with the cd in the drive?

I had probs with something like it the other day where I could boot from a knoppix cd, and where the os booted up as long as the xp disc was in the drive.

Turned out one of the drives I'd connected was fried and dying. The next day it wouldn't start at all with that hd connected.

EDit: I guess you could disconnect everything but the hd with the os and try it. if it work one of your other drives got busted during the switch.

**healimonster** · 02-27-2005, 10:20 PM

I fixed the problem. The Mobo bios was detecting the drives as something other than an LBA drive.

I am not sure what an LBA drive even is, but I set it to manual detect, and LBA and the OS booted up fine.

**lynx** · 02-28-2005, 12:14 PM

Originally Posted by healimonster

I fixed the problem. The Mobo bios was detecting the drives as something other than an LBA drive.

I am not sure what an LBA drive even is, but I set it to manual detect, and LBA and the OS booted up fine.

Ah, that's always a good one.

XP, Win2k and (I think) NT4 will assume that if your drive supports LBA (Logical Block Addressing) then that's what you are going to use. Since Windows doesn't use the bios it never has problems reading/writing to the disk. Unfortunately in order to boot the bios also has to be able to read the disk, and if it thinks the layout is different the result is the problem you saw.