I own a new Gateway computer that came with Windows XP Home Edition as my operating system. About a week ago I upgraded to XP Pro. Just this morning, at 3 am, I turned on my computer, and instead of booting up, I got “Error loading operating system…”.
I turned my comp off and on again 3 more times, and still that came up. I called Gateway and they walked me through the reformating process, but I’m concerned about what caused this problem. I don’t want it to happen again.
There may well be nothing you can do, realistically speaking. Unless you were doing something drastic with settings or something like that, it could easily be a fault of Microsoft’s that can only be fixed by Microsoft, and only if Microsoft decides it’s worth it.
In other words, welcome to the joys of closed-source software.
Can’t help you as to why the problem happened, but remember than while booting, you can hold down <F8> and get a screen which allows you such options as “Use last known good configuration” or something like that.
It works for me. Every 3 months or so my WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG.SYS file becomes corrupted for no good reason. Microsoft has no explanation. The net is full of frustrated users with the same problem. Nobody seems to know why. If the <F8> options fail to help me, I boot from DOS and transfer the /SYSTEM32/REPAIR files to the system folder. I don’t know if this would work for you, but it takes a lot less time than reinstalling the system.
It sounds to me like a possible hardware problem. If it’s the error I’m thinking of, it’s not even getting far enough to try <F8>. It might be that a power surge, improper shutdown, or some other one-time event caused some data corruption,. In which case, reformatting probably fixed everything and you won’t have any more problems.
Or, it could be that the hard drive is flaky and trashed the data itself, in which case it may happen again.
If you’ve got a surge protector, shut the system down properly instead of just shutting it off, and take good care of your computer, you shouldn’t be having this severe of a problem. Keep an eye on it, keep any important data backed up, and if happens again, try to get Gateway to replace the hard drive.
Could it maybe be because XP doesn’t use a config.sys file? It does have a config.nt, but this is only loaded by programs which initialize a virtual dos machine. So unless you have one running at startup, it shouldn’t cause the machine to fail to boot up.