XP reinstall woes.

Not really my woes, but those of my brother in law.

He has a Hewlett Paackard machine and XP went kaput on it, he thinks he got a lot of viruses and it would no longer load up.
So i went round there at the weekend and did a reformat and reinstall for him thinking this would fix all his probelms, but alas it has not. What happens now is that after the reformat and installation of XP I reboot the PC to continue installation but it comes up with "error loading operating system" just after POST. I don`t knwo why it should do this, the OS is installed on the drive but for some reaon it won`t allow it lo load up. Have checked all the BIOS settings and it`s correctly configured.

Im not exactly the best when it comes to PC`s and software, so if anyone has any ideas iit would help very mucho.

What i was thinking was that because it is an off the shelf HP machine the motherboard is linked to the OS so changing it would screw things up royally, but surely not, right?

So you haven't got as far as completing the XP install? Might be an issue with the old Master Boot Record. Can you boot into a recovery console off the XP CD?
If so just run the "fixmbr" command and hopefully that should sort it.

I had a similar problem. I use killdisk to wipe the drive, then did the re-install and it worked. You might want to try the same maybe it will help.