Okay then a few days ago my IBM (boo hiss) HDD went for a burton.

I went out and bought a rather lovely shiney Maxtor HDD (200Gb).

The problem now comes that I stick in the XP CD and the system starts booting up and loading the drivers from the CD. It gets to the point when it says "Starting Windows" and then the screen goes blank and it just sits there.

I have even created the XP Home Edition Set-up disks (all 6 of them) but the system gets to the same point.

The drive is not partitioned but if IIRC I can partition it as part of the set-up procedure.

I have a Windows 98 Boot disk and thought about partitioning the drive with that but it could only cope with 65Gb (ahh the good old days of small drives (flashback to my first HDD of 20Mb)).

Does anyone have any ideas of:

- What is going on
- How I can get the OS installed
- Why Microsoft suddenly hates me so much

Cheers,
Mark

 

Is the disk (SCSI or IDE) on the same channel as the CD-ROM ? If so, make sure one is set to master, the other slave. May be a reason why its not working. Check the new HDD is the same as the old one.

When you boot it does it go through the blue screen loader menu and then let you create a new partition on the disk ?

Dave

 

Does the bios detect the drive as 200GB? If it does not, then a bios upgrade should hopefully fix that problem.

H

 

doesn't xp need sp1 to recognise 200mb drives ?

 

Partition Magic, make say a 60gig partition, then retry the install on it.

 

It is an IDE drive on a seperate channel to the CD-ROM.

I would use Partition Magic but I wouldn't I need an OS in place to do that?

I think the BIOS is okay... something I need to check though

 

no you can boot pm off a cd

 

What he said ^

 

Thanks guys.

Tried again last night.

The BIOS which is at the latest update thinks the drive is 136Gb and the computer still refuses to play ball when installing XP.

I know of a couple of other people that have found the motherboard getting increaingly flaky (same problems with different peripheral devices) so it is time to get rid of the I-WILL KK266-R and replace it with something nice and up to date.

 

If you do need XP service Pack1 to recognize that size drive (i don't know, but if you do) you can always slipstream the service pack into XP and make a new install CD. I never install XP and then upgrade with service pack 1 anymore.
There are some good guides on the subject on the net, just search google. You will of course need a working PC with a burner!

 

Asus a7n8x-dx