Vista - Disk Not Ready - Hard drive problem

[crb41479]

Hi,

I recently bought a Samsung 1TB SATA internal drive to use for a new system. I tried just installing XP on the HD, but I ended up getting a blue screen of death for some kind of pcis.sys error.

Using a USB adapter, I'm trying to format/partition the drive with my laptop, which has 64bit version of Vista, before trying to install Windows XP again.

When I plug it into my laptop and go into Disk management, the drive shows up, but when I right click on it and try to intialize the drive, it says "Disk not ready" and doesn't give me any options to fix it.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can get the disk to initialize?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Elixer]

Use the Samsung HD tools to wipe the drive.
http://www.samsung.com/global/...utilities/ES_Tool.html

 

[crb41479]

Hi,

I ran all the diagnostics and formatted the drive. It got a clean bill of health, but I was unable to install Windows XP. I got the Blue screen of death after the Windows installation initiated.

Any ideas? Thanks for your help

 

[Elixer]

What was the BSOD?

If you restart the install, does it always BSOD on you?

 

[Evadman]

You can also use DBAN to write zeros to the drive. I have done that a few times when I had disk issues reinstalling vista.

 

[crb41479]

I actually used a Windows XP SP2 disk instead of a regular Windows XP CD (which is what I used before) and it worked! I'm not sure why it worked, but it did.

Thanks for the tips!

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: crb41479
I actually used a Windows XP SP2 disk instead of a regular Windows XP CD (which is what I used before) and it worked! I'm not sure why it worked, but it did.

Well, the format routine on an XP RTM CD won't know how to create a system partition larger larger than 137 GB. Maybe it has other issues with something as large as 1 TB?