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windows setup keeps repeating

M

Madwombat

Junior Member
Alright. I tried a search and couldnt find anything that seemed the same or anything that worked.

So, this is my issue. I got a new Seagate 120 gig HD, I tried to use the supplied software to swap all my stuff from my old 20 gig HD to the new 120 gigger. well, it all seemed to go smoothly, until I had to re-wire my new HD to be the boot drive and I kept getting boot errors. so I figured I was doing something wrong and decided to do a fresh install. So i plugged in the new hard drive. rebooted my computer and slapped in the Windows XP disk. I goes through the first text part of the WinXP setup, formats, partitions and loads up some basic files, then says it needs to reboot, so I let it do so. It reboots and goes right back into the first test part of the windows setup, it will just do the first part over and over again and never go to the next setup part.

So. thinking it was possible the hard drive, which by the way is the second one I have tried this with, I bought a Maxtor one before this and it did the same thing.

Ok. so I go grab this old scary 8 gig drive from an old machine and plug it in, try and install WinXP and it works perfectly. reboots after the first part and goes right into the second graphical part of the install.

So, I am thinking that it must be something in my system not liking these drives. the only difference I can see is that the new drives were/are Ultra ATA drives and the 20 gig and the scary old one are normal ATA drives.

does anyone know of any conflicts or problems with the Abit NF& board not reading Ultra ATA Hard Drives???

thanks.
 
I have installed a number of drives up to 120 GB on other NF boards without any problems.

I am assuming you already installed XP on your 20 GB drive. If your original installation was an upgrade from Win 98 or SE, your old drive is probably formattted as FAT32, not NTFS. You didn't tell us which.

Your XP software already formatted your new drive. A quick solution may be to use Norton Ghost to clone your old drive to your new one. That should wipe out any error info on the new drive. Be sure to set Ghost so that it uses all of the 120 GB drive and, if your old drive is FAT32, to convert it to NTFS on the new drive.

If your old setup was an upgrade on a FAT32 drive, you may be better off doing a fresh installation from the ground up. It's more work the first time, but it will probably result in a cleaner installation.

Hope that helps. 🙂
 
the old drive had a fresh XP install done with Fat32. I tried using the Seagate supplied software to swap all my info to the new drive, and it gave me a boot drive error when it tried to read the HD at bootup.

Si I am trying to do a fresh install on the 120, and thats where the problem is coming in. it just repeats the first step after reboot. but iwhen I tried the old 8 gig drive, it worked fine, so something with the drive is causing it to repeat. and this isnt the first drive to do this. I bought a Maxtor HD first and it did the same exact thing so I returned it and got the Seagate, and its doing the same thing the Maxtor drive was.

the only thing that I can see the 2 new drives had in common is that they are both Ultra ATA drives. the 20 gig drive and the older 8 gig are both normal ATA drives. thanks.
 
Try removing the CD after the initial copying of files...? It may have something to do with your boot sequence - I haven't had that problem with WinXP, but it's happened with other OSs before.
 
On the NF7-S, try going into Advanced BIOS Features and see if it simply wants the boot drive changed from HDD-0 to HDD-1 or something. Remember, you took out the drive that it considered HDD-0.
 
Oh, yeah, good point -- whenever you're installing an OS onto a drive you want to be your new boot drive, PLEASE take out *all* other drives to avoid problems like that.
 
well. finally figured it out. I managed to get 2 bad hard drives in a row. I went and got my third one today and it works great. thanks for everyones help.
 
Sometimes you're just that unlucky, I guess. It still doesn't make sense to me as to WHY Windows Setup kept repeating, unless the drive just wasn't accepting being written to... but hey, as long as it's working now.
 
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