First of all, hello to everyone at this fourm, my name is Arthur

Ok so heres my problem.

I turned on the computer yesterday only to find an error message that read "Error Loading Operating System"

Everything was running perfectly the evening before and I dont recall any system changes done.

Here are some specs that might be important to solving this:

• The Hard drive is a 400gb western digital model WD4000KD
• It is a SATA hard drive but i am not running RAID, I am only using one hard drive with two partitions on it, a C drive and D drive
• I am running Windows XP professional with SP2

Cant think of anyting else but if you need anymore information on it, just let me know.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated, I have years and years of data on it that are important to me


**And also I would like to add, i tryed booting for WinXP cd and went under recovery mode, where its like DOS format and it would not show anything on my hard drive, Nothing in the C drive, didnt even show that there was a D drive. Pretty much as if there was no drives detected and non of the scan disk or fix bot commands work.

also when i boot from xp cd and go under intall OS, it does not show my partitions. shows that there is no disk avail but when i turn the computer on it shows that Hard drive 400gb is Status:functional

Does your harddrive sound right like different sound than yesterday?Also did your pc randomly Get bluescreens or have errors at bootup before?

No, everything sounds like it always has and no, never recieved any random bluescreens

Hi A2daRL2daN.

Either the drive's partitioning has gotten messed up ot the hard drive itself has gone bad. The first thing to do is to check out the mechanics of the drive with WD's own diagnostic utility.
Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/

If the hard drive tests out bad you can get a replacement from WD. As it turns out, all drive manufacturers of drives with sizes between 400GB and 500GB have severe quality problems. The smaller drives are good and even the WD 750GB is very solid.

If the drive tests OK then the only thing you can do is reinstall the OS and hope that this doesn't happen again.

I suppose a virus or malware could cause this problem, so have this minimum protection installed at all times:

Essential XP Virus & Malware Protection

Thank you WinCrazy, I tried the diagnostics for the drive and the test results were that the hard drive is fine and has no problems.

But when I boot from WinXP cd to install the OS, it does not show any drives to format, partition, and to install on.

Any idea as to how I can get them to show so I can install onto them.

Well just to update and end this thread, I found the correct driver for my hard drive and was able to access it in dos mode which allowed me to do a FIXBOOT. After the FIXBOOT everything worked but i noticed my cmputer had bunch of viruses and malware so I backed up my information and reformated.

Thank you to all those contributed.

Solved

Thank you for letting us know

Great to hear it's all up and running again.

[Fixed]