I just received a new hard drive from a friend to replace one that was failing. I installed it and booted up the computer and was greeted with the following message:
EMM386 unrecoverable privileged operation error #01 press ENTER to reboot
When I press enter nothing happens and I cannot get past that screen. Does anyone have any idea what causes this and how I can get around it?
Thank you in advance.
I think that the hard drive was previously running either NT or 2000. I would like to wipe it clean and installed XP.
What you posted makes no sense.
You just took this used hdd and installed it?
You want to install XP?
Well, EMM386 is a part of MS-DOS and all DOS-derived Windows OSes (including Windows 95 and 98, not including Windows NT, 2000, or XP). It is related to how those OSes manage memory, and doesn’t have much of anything to do with the hard drive, which is why Reeder is so confused.
Apparently, either EMM386 or another program is trying to do something naughty (the ‘unrecoverable privileged operation error’) and the OS won’t let it. I don’t see how this is even tangentally related to the hdd itself, either.
This site gives some information on how you might recover from the error.
This thread gives some advice:
Hope all that helps.
Get around it by booting from your XP cd, formatting the HDD, and installing XP.
Thank you Derleth and Aktep. It looks like the hard drive I got has something going on with it so I decided to do what Aktep suggested. The problem is that I cannot seem to get my computer to boot from disk. I am in the bios and have gone to the “boot” screen and enabled my ATAPI CD-ROM and saved. However when I boot up, I still get the same error message and it doesn’t seem to boot from disk. Any suggestions?
Get the, “Diskmanager” for your HD, on a floppy to set up the HD, prior to installing XP.