"Error Loading Operating system"?


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Old 05-29-06, 01:10 PM
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"Error Loading Operating system"?

Alright, about 3 years ago my grandmother bought a Gateway MFATXSTL KTH 300S and now I think her HD is shot, but Im not to sure.

Ok so my grandmother calls me today saying her PC isnt working, so I asked her whats wrong, well she tells me there is a black screen and it is says "Error loading operating system". So go over there get the PC and ALL the disks it came with and brought it home to see what I could do.

So Here is what I have done. I tried reinstalling the windows with the operating system CD that came with the PC and everytime I try to partition the drive it tells me that it cant be partitioned because of bad sectors. Next I put in the Drivers disks and I got to running the ScanDisk program and I got a message that says:

" ScanDisk Encountered a data error while reading the FAT entry for cluster 81920

This error prevents ScanDisk from fixing this drive"

Then I rebooted the PC from the same disks and tried to install the windows files, but I got a message saying:


" General faliure reading C Drive"

And while it was processing through the PC Bus it also listed that AIC-789X cant be found and ASP18U2.SYS cant found.


So does anyone know how I can go about fixing this? I have a feeling that the HD is dead, but I'm not sure

Oh the operating system is windows XP Home
 
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Old 05-29-06, 01:20 PM
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A possible explanation is that the hard drive is shot.

Another possible explanation is that the cable has become partially disconnected.

Open the case and chck the cable. If it's fine, raplace the ahrd drive. It's not worth spending any time trying to install windows on a drive that gives you erors.
 
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Old 05-29-06, 07:29 PM
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seems like it's looking for a scsi drive that isnt there. Have you tried making a boot disk and just formatting the drive?
 
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Old 05-29-06, 07:35 PM
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Yeah, your HD is shot. lol. If you have double checked your IDE connections, and maybe even replaced the IDE cable, it's shot.
 
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Old 05-30-06, 04:02 PM
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the files you mentioned that look like SCSI are loaded every time you load the OS. They, amongst hundreds of others, are the default set of drivers Windows ships with. It then tries to detect ( after copying the files to the HD ) which ones it needs to actually do the install.

I vote with the majority. you COULD try a utility like spinrite to recover the bad sectors if you have a copy and if you have a L O T of time to work on it.
 
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Old 05-30-06, 04:28 PM
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Like Racraft said, check your cables first. if they're good, the hard drive is toast. They're cheap these days.
 
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Old 05-30-06, 08:08 PM
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Extra thought: if you do replace the HD you might run into a problem if the new HD is too large. There were limitations at about 136 Gigs and also at a higher number over the past 5-10 years... if the drive were larger than the limit for that time Windows might install but would be unstable. The problem was caused by either/or the OS, the BIOS and one other component failing to allow for that large a partition. So the FAT or NTFS table might tell itself sector X was 64K when in fact it was 128K.

I bring it up because the last time I ran into that problem was 2-3 years ago
 
 

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