This is for a friend because his comp isn't working and he is understandably very distraught. He tells me his fan and power supply died. So he replaced both of those "very carefully". Now his comp is saying "Error Loading OS" When it came to installing Windows he says: "It would do the first part of the installation, the preparation to install it fully. Then it would go to do that second part and go back to the first part as if the preparations never happened. If we didn't have the CD in there it would say the error loading os." He also assures me he checked all of the cables and they were in their proper places.
mine says (at that point) hit key to boot from disk... if i dont (given time) it'll continue on to complete install. Dont hit any keys. SATA drive? or IDE? sometimes to get a clean install i'll use the installation disk for the brand of hardrive first (to clean off drive of any files) & then run OS install ie: maxtor drives i use maxblast4 hope i was helpful
His response: "I have an IDE Hard drive and a SATA drive, the SATA drive won't even be recognized by the installation cause the motherboard is older then SATA drives. We customized a Windows disk with the drivers for the SATA drive but no dice. The IDE one we formatted it and it still looped."