Help with installing XP....

[Shagga]

Okay, this is long winded so I'll try to mention bullet points rather than describe the entire situation.

I have spent an age trying to get my brothers PC to install WinXP but cannot for the life of me understand why the installation setup cannot find his hard drive. When I boot from the WinXP installation CD setup goes through the normal process of analysing the system, installing the setup files etc right up to the point where WinXP gives you 3 options.

1) Press enter to install XP
2) Press R to enter the recovery console
3) Press Esc. to Quit Installation.

When you press enter I get a screen saying windows was unable to find a hard drive!

This is the setup -

Mobo: ASUS P4P800
HD: Maxtor 120GB Plus 9

Hard Drive is connected to IDE0 and set up as a Master. There is no Slave drive connected.
CD Rom Drive is connected to IDE1 and is also set up as a master. There is no slave drive.

I have checked within the BIOS and everything is normal. Both the hard drive and CD Rom Drive are detected as normal. The RAID controllers are not enabled.


These are a few of the things I have done to get the drive to be recognised but without success.

1. Formatted the drive in both FAT32 and NTFS on my system. The drive is found straight away in my system and running a few utilities say the drive is healthy. I have also partitioned the drive and made one partition active, yet it still cannot be found in my Bros PC.
2. Tried many combinations of Jumper settings including setting the drive to CS (Cable Select)
3. I have booted to DOS using an old Win98 boot disk. - When the drivers for the CD Rom Drive are loaded it fails saying that it cannot find any CD Rom Drives!!! Also, it cannot find the hard drive either.
4. Run the Maxtor Powermax utility in DOS and it finds the drive and reports no problems at all.
5. I have tried changing the IDE cables (Tried two) and still Xp/Dos cannot detect the drives.

I'm sure I'm missing something and would appreciate some ideas if possible.

Thanks in anticipation.

 

[zzzz]

have you tried just an empty drive...(no partitions etc)
Also change the order of drives? (put HD where Cd was and vice versa)

 

[slick230]

Are there any boot device options in your bro's bios? Maybe the bios is set to boot off of the CD drive only, and doesn't look for any hard drives? I know in my bios I have like 4 different boot devices that are checked before actually booting to Windows.

 

[Shagga]

Originally posted by: zzzz
have you tried just an empty drive...(no partitions etc)
Also change the order of drives? (put HD where Cd was and vice versa)

I have not tried the drive with no partitions if I'm honest, but I have never had this issue before with drives that are already partitioned. But I will try it.

I have changed the order of the drives but to the same outcome. :frown:

Originally posted by: slick230
Are there any boot device options in your bro's bios? Maybe the bios is set to boot off of the CD drive only, and doesn't look for any hard drives? I know in my bios I have like 4 different boot devices that are checked before actually booting to Windows.

There are a number of Boot Options, 4 if I remember correctly. Hard Disk, Floppy, CD Rom and I think the other is either a network. If I disable all other boot options and just leave the hard drive I still get the same probelm, i.e. WinXP cannot find the drive!!! Just like yours, if the first boot device does not have bootable media etc, then the BIOS moves onto the next, then the next, then the next until it find one.

Thanks ppl, keep em coming, I'm sure I'm missing something simple... I'll check out the BIOS revision also and see if there isd a new one. This shouldn't be a problem as it worked before.

 

[Shagga]

Just had a call from my Bros. He expalined to me that he switched it on one morning and got the dreaded "NTLDR Missing" error message. From then on, he decided to restore a Ghost Image rather than mess about with trouble shooting that problem, but all of a sudden drives were not being recognised aparently, so he decided to format anyway....

This is doing my nut in....

 

[RVN]

What shape is the CD in? I had a copied CD of XP (slipstreamed w/sp1) on a Dell one time that gave me a similar message and would halt the installation. After, checking IDE cables, jumper pins and swapping hard drives ...I finally tried a different CD (for another computer with a different product key) upon which I changed the product key and activated.

The disc looked "clean" and must've worked at one time, but it turned out to be my problem.

 

[Shagga]

Originally posted by: RVN
What shape is the CD in? I had a copied CD of XP (slipstreamed w/sp1) on a Dell one time that gave me a similar message and would halt the installation. After, checking IDE cables, jumper pins and swapping hard drives ...I finally tried a different CD (for another computer with a different product key) upon which I changed the product key and activated.

The disc looked "clean" and must've worked at one time, but it turned out to be my problem.

That is possible. I never thought of that I must admit. I'll try my WinXp on his system and see if that was the problem. Good idea...

 

[Shagga]

Okay, sussed it. Would you believe it. Both his CD Rom and DVD Writer are shot!! Cannot believe it? Thanks for the suggestions ppl, thought I was going mad. I still don't know why the setup was saying it couldn't find the hard drive or even a DOS disk wouldn't find the HD either. Strange...very Strange...