I work for a rather large company, and we have a bunch of GX150 and GX270 systems.
We give these machines to our customers who use them to order stuff from us.
I got a machine back today that says " Error Unable To Load Operating System. "
Now, when we recieve these machines back, it usually means there's something wrong with them and I need to find out what and fix them. After they're fixed they can be packed up and ready to ship out to customers who's computers are giving them problems. We just replace them and then I fix the one that comes back; viscous cycle.
Anyways, when these systems come back, I reghost them. I have drives that have the OS all set up the way we need it to be and just ghost off of the drive.
So, I got the machine on the work bench. I ghosted it, rebooted and am still getting this message.
I've tried several hard drives all have come back the same.
Now, I know the drives are good and so is the IDE controller because Ghost was infact able to work; the bios also sees both hard drives and everything that's connected.
I know the Ghost is fine because i've used it several other times this morning and the machines i've used it in work fine.
I am unable to view any other websites here, I'm at work with limited access unfortunately. So if you could maybe copy / paste or summarize what the link shows, that'd be helpful.
Excerpt from http://whocares.de/archive/000682.php
Solution (I):
Go to the BIOS settings of your machine and change the translation method used to access the hard drive from the default setting "Auto" to "Large" (not LBA, not CHS!). Reboot and with some luck installation will pick up at the point where it aborted before. If it doesn't continue with the second part of the installation, you have to start over and do a fresh install. Leave the BIOS setting at "Large" for that task!
Note: There really *are* cases where you *have* to do a fresh install after changing the BIOS setting to "Large". However, it doesn't hurt to first try whether XP will finish the previous install ;-)
Now the only thing I would really like to know is: Why is it, that just Microsoft's operating systems seem to have this problem? Every Linux distribution I installed on the very same machine didn't have any problems whatsoever with the "Auto" setting. And to be fair: nor has Windows 98 ;-)
And I really wonder why it is so hard for Microsoft to post the actual fix on their support pages instead of the blah that's written there.
The Solution (II)
As Diana found out, another cause for this problem may be that an ATA-66/100/133 drive is attached with an 40 pin cable instead of an 80 pin cable. I can't verify this but consider it as enitrely possible for Microsoft to choke on that so I thought I'd put it up here.
Update I: On two of my test systems I was able to set the BIOS setting back to "Auto" after the installation of XP had finished. Your mileage may vary.
Update II: The system I had this problem with is a Pentium-IV 3,06 GHz with an Award BIOS 6.0 with any part of it hardly being any older than 18 months.
Update III: As I just found out some genius introduced a new way of setting the access mode in some BIOSes. Instead of allowing to set the access mode in the "STANDARD CMOS CONFIGURATION" screen, you have to use "IDE HDD AUTO DETECTION" instead. When the BIOS reports your drive there, you *don't* press "Y" to accept but instead press "N". You should then be able to chose whether to use "LBA" (don't) or "LARGE" (yup) as the access mode for the particular drive.
B_Coppins
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Posted July 20th, 2006 17:00