As you may remember, my computer has a failing hard drive and is on its last legs. Last year, I purchased a new, larger (500gb) drive and installed it in the computer (yes, I backed up everything first) but when I turned on the computer, it wouldn't recognize the new drive.

During the power outage this past week, I decided to go into the tower and do some dusting and tried reinstalling the new drive. I had read through my computer's technical manual for info on installing/upgrading the hard drive, did what it said and thought everything was hunky dory. When the power came back on and I turned the computer on, it wouldn't boot to the new drive BUT at least when I checked out the file list, it said that there were now two hard drives, a 75.+gb and a 500gb. Yay, an improvement!

Anyway, I tried changing the boot sequence in the BIOS to get the machine to boot from my WindozeXP cd - didn't work, the cd drive wouldn't read the cd. This morning, I used a cd drive cleaner on both my cd and dvd drives. Tried the Windoze disc in the dvd drive and success, it booted.

Started the Windows setup/install and then got caught in a loop. I had previously set up a partition for XP in the new drive (for about 105gb) but XP didn't like that partition so it sent me back to the setup screen where I deleted the partition and chose the option to allow XP the whole unallocated space. Pressed enter to continue and on the next screen, it told me that XP didn't like that partition and I needed to go back and delete and do another partition. I ended up doing this about three times before I gave up and quit the setup and booted into the old drive.

So my question is this: does anyone have any advice/suggestions for how I can break past this loop and finally get my XP installed on my new drive and get it running?


For reference: Dell Dimension 4700, currently running Ubuntu 11.10 on the old drive (and would like the new drive to be dual boot with XP)

Something tells me that the partition that's now on the drive is corrupt. This is where having a second computer comes in handy. You could install the drive in the #2 computer as an auxiliary drive in order to examine, repartition and format it.

Sid, if I chose the "delete partition" option on the XP setup menu, wouldn't that take care of a corrupted partition by deleting it?

Normally it should... but that's why I'm saying the partition may be corrupt and that's why the install disc is taking you on the loop.

OK, so should I try partitioning the drive again, before trying to boot the XP disc?

You can try it - if successful, do a complete format (this will take a while so you can go have a coffee, do the grocery shopping and maybe the laundry) before you install XP.

OK, I used Gparted to format the drive and that seemed to go well.

Booted from the XP cd and after going through the preliminary file loading, the options menu comes up. This is what is listed:

1 install xp - enter
2. create new partition - c
3. delete partition - d

Then it lists the partitions and asks you to choose which one you want to work on. I have the following:

partition C
partition E (space on C & E total the amount of gb on the bad drive)
and
partition F (space is total gb on new drive)

I arrowed down to F and hit enter to start installing XP. First, it didn't recognize the partition format. So I deleted again and chose the option to create a new partition and then tried installing again. This time, the message tells me that XP needs to write some startup files to the 76294mb partition, (the C partition) which is on the old drive. Is this normal?

It sounds like you're installing to the old drive... (?)

That's what I thought too. I can't figure out why though, since the new drive is listed in the options.

I'd disconnect the old hard drive, boot to the new drive from the XP disc and install xp on it. Then I'd install the ubuntu on the new drive. Ubuntu automatically creates a new partition and installs easily on a hard drive running xp. Transfer files from old drive afterward.

OK, I'll have to give that a try tomorrow. I just hope the computer recognizes the new drive.

Update: per Gramps advice, I disconnected the old drive. Everything seemed to go OK - XP recognized the new drive and did the format, partition and copying of files to it. No error messages or problems. After the computer rebooted, the XP logo screen came up, with the status bar and scrolling light and that seemed OK. But two hours later, nothing else was happening. No error messages, status updates or anything. I shut the computer off, reconnected the old drive and turned it back on and instead of booting into the old drive, it went into the new drive. I got the XP logo screen, with the scrolling light, but even after waiting another half hour or so nothing new happened. I have no clue what to do next.

I disconnected the new drive and am back on the old drive. Any advice about what I may have done wrong with the XP install would be appreciated.

You have a original winXP installation disk?
Did you copy all your original hardware drivers to a CD or memory stick so you can re-install?
Did you back up your doc, pics etc?
I would have tried it again without re-mounting the original C drive.
After OS installed successful did you remove the WinXP CD before reboot?

Yes, Jab, original disk with the key.
I have a disk with the drivers and utilities that came with my computer.
Everything important has been backed up.
I did disconnect the old C drive when I tried the second time. Everything went fine until the reboot, then I got hung up on the XP logo screen.
After I reconnected the old C, I turned on the computer and it booted into the new C (i had removed the XP cd before it booted but hadn't done that the first time).

Can you get into windows by booting from the CD?
If so, check control panel > administrative tools>>event log

Maybe you can see where you're stuck.
Or you could just try to boot without CD into safe mode by tapping F8 at startup

I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that. I was playing around with it this morning - figured I would try installing XP again and see what happens. This time, the computer only did the beginning portion of the setup where it inspects the drive and downloads files. Then it got hung up - message in the status bar was "Windows is starting the setup" but nothing happened after that, even waiting twenty minutes.

I wanted to use my Ubuntu utility to reformat the drive but I can't. If I leave both drives connected, the machine will only boot into the new drive, like it doesn't see the old one. So I'm stuck on the old drive for now.

I will try what you suggest tomorrow. I am just too frustrated right now to deal with it. I'll let you know what happens.

I guess my next question would be a CMOS setting - auto detect... just thinking "out loud".

Also... are these SATA drives (old and new) or are they EIDE?

You will need to explain CMOS to me, Sid.

Both drives are SATA.

Right at boot you have a chance to get into the BIOS where you can set which drive is the boot drive. I say tomato, Sid says tomatoe.

What I would do....

Disconnect old drive, mount new drive.
Pop in CD and start up. Hit delete several times to get into BIOS. Look there for options for "first boot device" etc. Set it to CD drive. Save settings and exit.
Now PC should tell "Press any key to boot from CD" or something like that. Hit "space".
At the Welcome to Setup screen, press ENTER to begin Windows XP Setup.


Follow the instructions on the screen to select and format a partition where you want to install Windows XP.
Follow the instructions on the screen to complete Windows XP Setup.

What Jab said.

The XP logo screen was only up for a few seconds this time and went right in the complete installation screen, which was an improvement. But, then I got an error message "The file 'asms' on W-XP is needed" and instruction to choose where the cd is to copy the file from. Only two choices, "global root\device\cdrom\i386" or "A:\" although I think something else can be typed in.

Went back on the old drive to google the error message and found it has something to do with Windows unable to see the cdrom drive. The possible fix involves using the command line to fix/delete certain registry keys. I've got step-by-step instructions on how to do it but am having major anxiety about losing my machine once and for all.

Are you doing a "clean install"? Meaning a complete new XP installation without worrying about old settings, documents etc?

I'd wipe out whatever is on your new drive and start over again.
XP installs on a totally empty PC a "RAM drive" in a temporary partition of a few MBytes. That's where typical needed generic drivers are copied to, ie CD rom driver.
With a clean XP install you should not have any missing files messages since all would be copied from the CD's i386 folder.
You could try to just work your way on the CD to the i386 folder and select that from where you want that missing files should be copied from.
Check your private messages.

New problem - I lost my monitor the last two times (yesterday, before I quit and this morning) I tried to finish the XP installation. When I booted the tower, the monitor wouldn't come back on. It took several reboots (and almost heart failure on my part) before the monitor would come on again.

So that's it. I quit. I'm done. The computer has defeated me.

Oh there's something funky going on in that box...