Did a clean Xp Pro install on my PC last night. It took bloody ages, and in that i mean started install at 1830h and it was still going at about 2300h. Is this normal ?

I did get to all the bits i had to respond to quite swiftly, but alot of the time the PC is sat there with the hard drive light on, seeming like its hung. It is an Abit KT7A Raid motherboard, Athlon 1Ghz, 384Mb ram, 30 and 60gb IDE hard disks, Creative Sound 5.1 soundcard, 10/100mbit ethernet...

Dave

 

Hmmmm... that took a long time!

Nah, have done a clean install with XP Pro 3 times now and never took that long.

 

Hmmn, definately seems too long - most clean installs I've done have taken btwn 2-3hrs...

 

I upgraded a fairly clean of W2000 Pro to XP on my Evo N600c notebook in about 1 to 2 hours. P3 866, 384MB.

 

how did you install it? did you boot it up from the cd or from a bootable floppy? check the BIOS if it is using LBA for the HDD.

i know booting up from a "self made" floppy with cdrom drivers and installing NT4/W2K/XP with d:\>i386\winnt.exe takes ages coz there's no smartdrv.

 

Did you have smartdrv.exe installed on your boot disk. If not, it will take flippin ages.....

Iain

 

now i put smardrv.exe in my bootable floppy coz it's a miracle how fast the install is compare with without smartdrv!!!

 

I booted off a CD, so i assume smartdrv.exe is on there.

Dave

 

I had similar probs over the weekend, booting from floppy first or copying i386 directory onto c drive resulted in DOG slow install, found it quicker/easier to dig around for moody cd rom driver file and boot straight from that.

Much faster.

 

hmmm... booting up from the cd should have smartdrv on it, so must be something else that is hogging the install. were the HDDs empty?

 

Well one hdd (30 gig one) has 2 partitions, 5gb and 23gb ish. i had reformatted the 5gb partition to install there. the other 60gb disk is 1/2 full (one partition)

I think i know what the problem is though. I have the KT7a RAID mobo. When i went home at lunch the PC had finished the install and was booted. I made some changes to the display and language and had to reboot. After 35 mins i left it to come back to work and it still hadnt booted.

Could it be looking at the RAID interface and because it does not have the Abit RAID drivers installed yet, just hangs looking, and eventually times out ?

Next thing i will do when i get home is install the Abit RAID drivers and cross my fingers. Otherwise its format c: and back with Win2k Pro !

Dave

 

i was gonna say it was the RAID, but are you using the RAID?

 

The mobo has 2 x standard IDE channels and 2 x RAID IDE channels.

I have the boot disk and the DVD-ROM connected to the standard IDE and the second disk and the CDRW connected to the RAID IDE channels. So its not installing to/from a RAID-connected device, but i was just wondering that if XP could see it, would it keep polling it, even if it didnt have a driver to load for it.

Dave

[Edited by druddle - 6/18/2002 4:32:31 PM]

 

You managed to install Win2000 on it before, so it must recognise the raid card. So you would expect the driver to be in XP too.
If not you need to press F6 early in the installation to specify the raid driver.
Have you checked if there's a raid driver for XP available.

 

The motherboard antivirus option is not set is it ?

Dave.

 

Sussed it. The old "hit F6" option was what i had missed !

Cheers

Dave