Windows XP Install Problems

[Laneer]

I am hoping someone here can help me with a problem I ran into last night. I upgraded from win 98se to win xp home, during the install an error came up that the win xp cdrom could not be found. I browsed for it and found only the hd present. So I rebooted with a boot disk and copied the I386 directory to the hd, rebooted and continued the install. When it could not find the cdrom again I pointed it to the hd. After install I noticed it took over after the win xp load screen it went to a black screen for over 4 minutes before the desktop showed up( during this time there was no hd activity). And on top of that neither my dvd drive nor my cdrom drive was present. I decided this could be becuase of upgrading so I shut everything down and installed a new hd. After formating I booted from the win xp cdrom and began a new install of win xp. It lost the cdrom again and I had to direct it to the secondary hd for the I386 directory( it asked for this about halfway thru the installing windows, after the copying of files). From the fresh install it still does the black screen for 4-5 mins between the starting screen and the desktop, and it will not show any cdroms(put they work fine if I boot from a boot disk).

My system consists of:
Asus A7V motherboard
Athlon 1.1 gig processor
1 gig of pc 133 ram
Creative Labs Geforce2 gts video card
Soundblaster Live 5.1 sound card
3Com 905txb 10/100 network card (model number might be off)
40 gig Exstor Hard drive
45 gig Western digital hd
24/10/40 Lite-on cdburner
8x Hitachi dvd-rom
Adaptec usb2 card (which is detected but win xp does not have drivers for)
Adaptec fireconnect 4300 card

Any help with solving this would be greatly appreciated. The system minus 512 megs of ram works great under win98se. I tried installing the driver for the Usb2 card on the initial install but it did not seem to help. Also if I boot to safe mode the cdroms show up. My current c: drive is the 40 gig exstor, which was cleanly formated for the install and nothing has been installed on it yet except for win xp(hard to install without a cdrom . As a side note on my first install I registered with microsoft(I had high hopes) I was wanting to know the file that needs to be copied to the new drive to keep the registration. If any more information would be helpful just post and ask.

Thanks

 

[kanderva]

Laneer,

Something that might help in this situation: In your BIOS Boot Menu, disable the hard drive as a boot device and make your CD-ROM (DVD-ROM) drive your primary boot device. This will force the installation to be conducted from the CD-ROM. If I recall (I did this for a Win 98SE install on a K7V mobo.), you can leave your system in this configuration throughout the installation process until its completion. Then, when you boot up again, reset your BIOS Boot Menu to return the hard drive to its rightful place as primary boot device.

Reformat your new hard drive directly from the Win XP CD-ROM, not from some other source. If this procedure works, then you can reinstall your original drive and try it on that one -- minus the formatting, of course, as you don't want to lose your existing data.

If this does not work, you might try disconnecting your CD burner prior to the install, then reconnecting it after the install; it would then be detected as a new device. It's possible that Win XP Setup is getting confused by the different CD burner and the DVD-ROM drive.

Can't help with the XP registration file; you may have to call Microsoft and beg for mercy. (Don't worry, my understanding is that they field these sorts of problems all the time.)

Best of luck!

Ken