| Slight chance of it being either the IDE controller on the motherboard or the [CD|DVD] drive you're loading it from (in decreasing order of probability). But that's much less likely than the choices that Sequel of Retiqlum mentioned.
Hard drive is, IMHO, the most likely candidate. Either the drive intelligence is bonkers or somehow the very first sector of the disk is bad.
Extremely deep background: The only time a BIOS will generally report "Error loading operating system" is when it cannot find the boot sector. This can happen because (in no particular order):
- The 0x55AA signature in the last 2 bytes of the MBR is missing or scrambled (or is it 0xAA55 for the MBR? Can't remember)
- The MBR (first sector) is not readable.
- The hard drive is not present, not detected, or bad.
- The motherboard/IDE controller/cable(s) is/are bad.
- Cthulu has eaten it.
etc.
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