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How to instal XP on new HD

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steviee7

Registered
Joined
May 27, 2002
Location
Florida
Just bought a new WD 80gig (8mb cache!) ANd have XP pro cd. here's what I did...
Installed new fresh HD and then booted my PC. Went into my mb BIOS to tell it to boot from CDrom (since there's no OS on the drive) Rebooted again and XP started to do some things I thought great! Then about 2 minutes into it XP comes up with an error to do with my HD. It says if you've reached this error then make sure all is fine and try to reboot. I reboot again and it gets to the same point. What do I need to do! Do I need to format the drive or do that fdisk (partition thing like in win98.) So I did that with my 98 boot disk and formated the drive. Rebooted and now the bios skips over the cdrom and then asks for the floppy. and stuff like there is no OS availiable. I'm lost now what do I do, whats the optimum way to instal XP on a fresh new drive.?

thanks
 
actually your cd rom or dvd rom should boot it without having to go the bios. the windows xp disk is bootable. it works on my computer and i have a cheap sony vaio desktop.(its my family computer and im 14 so im still saving up for my system)
 
steviee7, try this:

First, make sure your BIOS is set up right for that HDD. Read the manual that came with it, or go to the manufacturer's website for any information you may need on this.

Second, run a program like memtester86 on your RAM to make sure it is stable. Memory errors will halt a WinXP install very quickly.

Third, try an install off the HDD itself, if it is set up correctly...
1) Make sure your primary boot drive is the CD-ROM.
2) Boot off your 98 CD, choose to start computer with CD-ROM support.
3) At the A:>, type C: <enter>
4) At the C:>, type md WINXP <enter>
5) Type cd WINXP <enter>
6) Insert the Windows XP CD
7) Navigate to the CD-ROM drive (type D: <enter>, or whatever letter your CD-ROM drive is)
8) At the D:>, type cd I386
9) At the D:\I386>, type winnt
10) Tell the set up to save the files to C:\WINXP

This will copy the set-up files to your HDD for a local install (this will rule out whether your CD-ROM has problems)

After that, you should be good to go. If any of the above steps do not work, then look at the corresponding hardware and fix that problem. Sounds like you have a BIOS setting that isn't right for that HDD...look into that first.

Also, let us know what your system specs are, and we can narrow things down even more.

...and welcome to the forums!
 
Thanks takiwa, I'll try that tomorrow.

It seems to be crazy that the first time I booted (with the fresh drive), WinXP booted from the cdrom drive and after I got the HD error it never boots from the cdrom anymore even though I set the bios to do so. Why won't it work any more? ..crazy!
ANyways I have an ABIT BD7-RAID with P4 1.6 northwood. ABIT GF4MXPro, crucial pc2100 ram, WD800JB and a Seagate 60 gig.
I know it's better to instal fresh but I might just instal 98 and then instal XP over it. (i've done 98 enough times to have memorized my cd key)
 
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