djs488
08-26-04, 11:38 AM
Ok, im building my friend a new computer, and we bought a 80gig western digital hard drive hooked it up, and inserted the xp cd. it would always stop at verifying DMI pool data........... and i called up the tech people at mwave (where i bought the stuff), they concluded the hard drive was DOA, and allowed me to send it back and they'd replace it. My friend decided this was too long to wait, so we're sending it back for a refund, and we're gonna just buy one at best buy. In the mean time, i hooked up his old dell hard drive with his new comp so he could get things running at least. Well, then i decided that we could just format this one and reinstall windows xp home and it would be good as new anyway. So i followed the instructions on the sticky post in this section, and everything worked fine as far as i can tell. However, when we put in the xp disk to install it, it got to the blue setup screen, but came up with an error message, something along the lines of "hard drive is damaged and installing cannot proceed... check to see if it is connected properly and clear of viruses." Well, it must be connected properly as we havent ever disconnected since we had XP running on it earlier, furthermore, there shouldnt be any viruses on it since we just formatted. Finally, this is one of the errors we got with the brand new 80gig drive, which leads me to believe that that drive was not DOA, and here's why... Unlike most windows XP install disks i have seen, this one has no fancy holograms on the front and says it is a recovery disk only for reinstalling. I inquired to the tech people at MWAVE, and they said this is becasue it was a OEM disk, but i thought even the OEM disks had the fancy holograms. Anyway, this theory also has a flaw in that, when, i was originally told (by the mwave tech people) that i didnt need to format the hard drive manually, and that when installing XP, it would delete the hard drive automatically. This was not the case, because when I reinstalled XP on his old hard drive, many of his old files were still present. But the point is, that installation worked fine, this is WITH the "recovery" disk. Is it possible that the only reason why this worked is becasue windows was previously installed on this hard drive? Also, I have a windows XP cd with a key at my house, would it be illegal for me to use this to install windows on my friends hard drive? I know this was a confusing post, and you are probably more confused than I am, but I would be grateful for your help. Thanks a lot!