There's something about Dell

[rcomo]

I have never encountered this problem, so I thought I would ask ya'll's advice and opinion.

A family memeber's Dell has a broken HD, so I replaced it with a WD 80gb 7200SE. Upon loading XP on it, I am on a perpetual loop where the machine reboots when it is supposed to (after the partition and preliminary load of Widows), and then upon load it wants to repeat this process over and over; it seems to never take the next step in the instalation of Windows.

Can anyone provide some direction here? thanks. I have no idea what the problem is; I would like to point out I have used the XP disk more than once to load on different machines (my own personal built ones) and there has never been an issue with the disk in the past, so I don't think it is that; does Dell have some proprietary software that is neccessary to load a Dell XP disk?

The option upon load are: Delete partition, Repair Windows, or Install Windows. Choosing either repair or install results in the same loop over and over again.

 

[Budmantom]

Why don't you use the original Dell disk and call tech support.



Tom

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Dell have some proprietary software that is neccessary to load a Dell XP disk?

in some instances ..yes..also quite a few DELLs' are cable select on their ide devices as well as the WinXP being an OEM variant..gl

 

[bacillus]

is this a sata hdd?

 

[rcomo]

So, reading into your answer Scrap, I should place on cable selcet and get the XP disk sent with the machine. Thanks.

 

[jamesbond007]

The problem I see here is that you used WD to replace it. 😉 (Will-Die harddrives in my book, Western Digital has no reference!)

At any rate, set the HDD to cable select and try again. If it is already there, set it to master. If it is sharing an IDE chain, take off the primary slave device and try that. I have seen and experienced many times that WD drives will only function properly when they're the *ONLY* drive on the IDE chain. YMMV, but that's my story and I'm stickin' to it. 😛