Okay, so I had just finished installing a brand new 300GB Seagate drive into my old HP Pavilion desktop. Things were working beautifully -- I had formatted the drive, I was able to read and write from it, and I was about to start moving files onto it from a different computer on my network when I realized that I had left out a piece of plastic (the one that directs airflow from the fan to the heatsink) when I resealed the case. So I shut the computer down, unplugged everything, and opened the case again. I reattached the piece and closed up the case, ready to start moving those files.
Unfortunately, upon booting the computer I was faced with 3 words nobody likes to see: "Error Loading OS". I've looked around these forums and nothing seems to apply. This post seemed like it would yield a solution, but I tried what fixed that problem and it didn't work. The really weird thing about my situation is that it WAS working and now it's not. I checked all the cables for connection after this message showed up, and none of them had come loose.
If it matters, I had an 80GB drive with Windows XP installed that I had set as the master/boot drive, with my new 300GB installed as a slave (just extra space). I don't have any Windows XP discs because the OS came pre-installed with this computer (I knew that would come back to bite me some day). What can I do?
(PS: Please phrase everything you can in terms that are as simple as possible, preferably detailing steps if what you say to do isn't eminently obvious. I'm as much of a n00b with this kind of thing as one can get, and I think I got pretty lucky in having been able to get the drive up at all, even if it was for such a brief time.)
Unfortunately, upon booting the computer I was faced with 3 words nobody likes to see: "Error Loading OS". I've looked around these forums and nothing seems to apply. This post seemed like it would yield a solution, but I tried what fixed that problem and it didn't work. The really weird thing about my situation is that it WAS working and now it's not. I checked all the cables for connection after this message showed up, and none of them had come loose.
If it matters, I had an 80GB drive with Windows XP installed that I had set as the master/boot drive, with my new 300GB installed as a slave (just extra space). I don't have any Windows XP discs because the OS came pre-installed with this computer (I knew that would come back to bite me some day). What can I do?
(PS: Please phrase everything you can in terms that are as simple as possible, preferably detailing steps if what you say to do isn't eminently obvious. I'm as much of a n00b with this kind of thing as one can get, and I think I got pretty lucky in having been able to get the drive up at all, even if it was for such a brief time.)
