I foolishly installed Mac OS X on my laptop, and now I cannot boot XP. "Error loading operating system" I have tried reactivating the windows partition with BootMagic; I have tried FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the recovery console; I have tried doing a recovery install; and I still cannot boot.

I have copies of both Hiren's Boot CD and UBCD4Win if there are any tools on them that may be useful.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Asus A8Js
Intel Duo T7200
2048MB RAM
100GB HD
GeForce Go 7700

Oh, and the idiot that I am... I forgot the BIOS password.

Hello and welcome to PC Help Forum.

So you tried to create a dual boot?

Or did you just installl MAC OS?

Once you have removed bios battery and replaced it,reboot laptop do you then see a choice of wich OS you can logon to?

Is your laptop capable of running MAC os?

Turn power off to laptop remove cover and remove BIOS battery for one min,replace BIOS battery,reboot PC.
This should bypass the password for you.

The BIOS battery in a laptop is usaly attached via a small cable to mainboard(but not always)the battery is usaly contained in a small plastic square case.

Disconnect the wire very carefully.


If you do not see both operating systems listed there on lets say MAC then I hope you have the XP Pro disk as you will need to reinstall windows.

i did not try dual booting since i didn't have any boot software to install. i figured i could just use one of the utilities on my boot cds to change the active boot partition as needed. i forgot to mention that i have also tried getting rid of Mac OS X as well. i used partition magic and simply deleted the partition and then resized my windows storage partition to take advantage of the new unused space.

Ok have you got the XP Pro install disk?

XP Pro is an upgrade it cannot be downgraded.

You tried to install MAC over Pro that is were your problem lys.


You will need to do a reinstall of XP Pro.Have you got the reinstall disk?


You have corrupted the MAC and PRO Operating systems.


There is no operating system to repair?You fully tried to install MAC over Pro.

Here is your fix:

First once you have flashed BIOS by removing battery for 1 min,then replacing it.

Reboot laptop and on the post screen it should say some thing like this?

To enter setup press?That is either F1/F2/Del or another.

Set first boot to CD/DVD rom put in XP Pro CD press F10 save and exit.

Then follow this link:How to partition and format a hard disk in Windows XP

i didn't try installing it over XP, i installed it to a separate partition. i just didn't use a multi-OS boot loader, thats all. Mac OS X worked almost fine after the installation. Obviously its not designed to run on a PC so there were a few things wrong (ie. keyboard and mouse didn't work so i had to plug in an external keyboard and mouse; wireless didn't work either).

yes, i have the XP disk. as i mentioned before, i already tried a few things from the recovery console. when that did not work, i then tried to do a recovery install which did not work either. the thing that makes no sense, is that when i did a search for threads where other people had the same error during boot, i tried everything that was mentioned which had fixed their issues. I am not willing to do a full reinstall of XP since then i would have to reinstall a whole lot of other things as well. there HAS to be some way of fixing this.

i am about to head out for class now. when i get back, i'm gonna pull the HD out and hook it up to my desktop, see what can i can see from there. i am hoping that its something maybe as simple as a couple of corrupted files. maybe there is something wrong with the autoexec.bat and/or config.sys, maybe a couple others as well?

Ok you could try this link your fix should be on it?"Error Loading Operating System" Error Message When You Restart Your Computer During Setup