^$@^(*$%^# XP setup, AAArrgh!

[waco]

A power supply on my second machine went bad and took out the mobo and cpu. An AMD X2 socket 939 4200 2.2 GHz on a Gigabyte K8N mobo are installed now. The rebuild replicates the original and has 2 optical IDE drive and 2 SATA hard drives. When I boot it up from the XP disk in the CD-Rom drive, setup starts, reformats the C drive, copies files to the drive okay, but when it reboots for installation of XP, it reverts back to setup. This never happened on the original build and is driving me nuts. :banghead: I need some ideas here, fellows.

[hey_moe]

Have you tried a different program to format your hard drive. Something is still on the hard drive preventing the install. If you are using windows to format you still have to much crap left on the HD. Also are you using IDE cables are Sata cable.On some of the new MB's you have to hit the F6 key to install the proper storage drivers for it to be able to see the OS.

[waco]

There's IDE cables on the optical drives and Sata on the hard drives. Didn't have to slip any drivers in via a floppy when the mobo was an EVGA. I'm was hoping I wouldn't have to this time, altho I'm beginning to think I might have to borrow the floppy drive out of the wife's computer. Funny, though, the setup gets all the way to the finish of initializing and reboots...and goes back to the beginning of setup instead on to installation. The drive will format okay during set up, but last night I ran the Recovery Console/ Disk Check and two unrecoverable problems were found after the scan hardly got out of the gate. Tonight I ran "chkdsk /r" again from the Console and it finished, even repairing some errors. I think I'll run it again and see what happens. I was all ready to pop for a new hard drive. Maybe I still will. Sure am glad all the good stuff (read flight sims) was on the other hard drive. Maybe I can save it. Is there a drive wipe download out there I can burn to a CD that'll self start when I put it the CD ROM?

[hey_moe]

In your BIOS did you set your Sata connection to Raid. Then you also have to go to your drives and set them up to which one detects first and how they run during the start up. Something is still wrong on the HD that is stopping the final set up.

[waco]

I'm not setting up raid. I have sata C for windows and sata D for flight sims. If you meant boot priority, it's set to CD-ROM first then hard drive. Last night I twice ran chkdsk in the Recovery Console. The second time no errors were found, so maybe I'm getting somewhere. Now I'm trying to run a format from the Recovery Console and can't seem to get the syntax right. :banghead:

[waco]

Well, after much Googling and too many tries, I gave up on running format from the Recovery Console. I found a free hard drive wipe program, got it burnt as a bootable ISO image, and it's three quarters thru wiping the drive clean. Then I'll try a clean XP install. I'm crossing my fingers.

[waco]

The wipe works wonderously, but still couldn't get Windows to install. After reading that Vista was the first MS OS to fully support SATA, I wondered if XP w/SP3 provided any support. I got out my XP w/SP3 disk and let it load on the wiped hard drive. Bingo, nary a problem. Of course MS thinks it's a counterfeit copy, but now I know the hard drive is okay.:jump: Think I'll get a floppy drive so I can F6 the correct drivers in during setup.

[HundertzehnGustav]

depending where u got ur copy from, just use the fone to register ur copy
talk to the customer care and tell em u had to replace ur Mobo cause it crapped out.

works every time in here, and i did that -censored- times already:friday:
:costumes:

[waco]

I ordered a floppy drive and a box of disks and am going to try the F6 key insert of the sata drivers during windows setup. And if that begins to frustrate me too much, I'll just do a clean install of windows with the new XP SP3 disk I ordered. The XP SP3 disk I did a fresh install on the broke machine with is already activated on this machine and I don't want to muddy the waters.