Hard drive died and got a replacement from the IT guys at work that will hopefully get me by for a little while. I was told that the drive was formatted before they gave it to me. I simply inserted the new drive into the slot where the old one was located, plugged in the power supply and the data cable, turned on the machine, slipped in my operating system disk and got a black screen with "Error loading operating system."

I shut down the machine with the disk inside and powered it back up and got the same message. I read that I should look in the BIOS, but I don't know enough about what to look for so I came here...

I hope someone can help...

Thanks

Go into bios and select boot cdrom first in the boot order. You are probably getting the error because hardrive is first on boot order,

That was all it took. Thank you very much.

Glad it worked for you. Thanks for the follow up.