Just got a copy of XP, not working...

[Bobby Manus]

I told it to boot from the cd and it brought me to a windows screen then it loaded a lot of drivers and kernals and what not, then it says "Setup is starting windows" on the bottem bar and it just hangs there. Its been 10 minuts or so already and I tried rebooting and it did the same thing. This is a new system and its never had an operating system on it so I dont know if it works or what but does anyone have any ideas on what could be doing this? I don't think its the XP cd its brand new and straight out of the box but who knows maybe microsoft put to much effort into the cd cover and not enough to the actual data :) The cd must have 100+ Microsoft Genuine stickers on it lol. Any help is apreciated.

[Bobby Manus]

Ok i think i might of figured out what the problem may be. I didnt know that FAT32 only suports up to 32GB's. This harddrive is a 40GB harddrive so should I make like a 30gb partition and a 10gb partition and keep it FAT32, would it be able to instal XP then or do I need to make it 1 big NTFS file system. I don't know how to make a NTFS filesystem, so if this is what you recomend for me to do then please also tell me how, thanks. I read in the XP manual that if you use a NTFS file system that you can only have 1 OS, which is fine this system will only be using XP. Let me know what you guys recomend, thanks!

[WillysNut]

Reinstall Windows from the CD as you did before but watch the directions carefully. What I usually do is throw in a bootable floppy or CD of Win98se and fdisk the drive.

I remove the exisiting partitions but *do not* format the drive. Boot from the XP CD and select "New Install". It will say something like "advanced configuration required".

Watch for directions that say to install windows on the specified drive. It will then ask you how you want to format the space. There will be 4 Selections.

Fat 32 (Fast)
NTFS (Fast)
Fat 32
NTFS <--This is the one I used

I didn't like the term "fast" so I selected the longer full format. After that I didn't have any problems. Good luck!

[Bobby Manus]

Ok I deleted all of the partitions on the drive, exited fdisk and then shut down. I tried to boot off of the XP cd and it gave me the same problem, it hung on the "Setup is now starting windows". Is there an XP boot disk or should I just keep booting off of the cd? Does anyone else have any ideas why this is hanging at boot? Thanks.

[bdf24]

Try this. Put in a win 98 or WinME bootup floppy disk. Boot up with CDrom drivers. Then when you get to an A: prompt, type smartdrv. You may have to do it twice before it confirms that it loaded. Then get to your CDrom drive Prompt. Then get to your I386 folder. So it would look like this. "E:\I386" asuming your cdrom drive would be e:. Then when at that prompt type "winnt". That will bring you to the winXP setup. Then just follow the instructions.
The smartdrv speeds up the file transfer alot. Disregard this if you've already tried it.

[Bobby Manus]

Ok i just tried installing from bootdisk and it freezes again after it loads all the drivers, this time it says "Please wait..." rather then windows is starting setup or whatever it locked up on when I tried to boot from the cd. I will give your idea a shot right now and Ill let you know how it turns out when im done thanks for the tip.

[Bobby Manus]

How do I open a directory in dos? I forgot the command. I was able to find the I386 folder on my d drive but I dont know how to open it :rolleyes:

[el]

cd windows

[Bobby Manus]

OK I THINK I FIXED IT!! I flashed the mobo bios (its a epox 8kha rev 1.3) and it finally passed the screen where it freezes! thanks for all your help guys youve gotten me out of many sticky situations, its a really crappy feeling to put together a brand new top end system and not see it boot into windows right away. Setup is now formating from the cd for NTHS (not the "Quick" form becuase I never had good expierence with quick formating for floppy disks, not going to mess around with my harddrive, im with whoever sugested that up there :) ) and hopefully I will be able to add my opinion to that XP poll down there in a few hours :D

[WillysNut]

So it was the BIOS verison eh? Good to know! *Making mental note*. Seems to me the hardware testing process is very finicky for XP. I have 5 machines running at home w/ XP on two.

One newer Intel based machine loaded without a hitch. My Duron box was much more problematic. I ran into the same freezing issue but I just went about the install from complete scratch instead of a clean install from within 98se.

Smiles! :)

[bdf24]

I had winXP on my machine with no troubles at all. But since I installed it on my parents pc I've had a hell of a time getting rid of IRQ conflicts and other little glitch's that keep poping up and dissapering.

[Yodums]

*puts that into his head like that senoir member*

Never had to had any installation problems with Win XP.