Member Avatar for the taxidermist

hey, thanks in advance.

i've got an ugly problem. i have a seagate hard drive (80gigs) it used to have win2000 on it. i ran my xp disk from win2k but it didnt install over win2k and created a dual boot. so i set my pc to boot from the cd-rom and used my winXP disk to clean out this dual boot and reformat the drive installing winXP. however, when XP go's to install, it loads all the stuff after it formats the drive then reboots. it says it will continue after the reboot however it doesn't it go's back to the widows set and wants to start over. how can i get XP on my harddrive? i dont have a floppy.

thanks much,

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Member Avatar for bentkey

I recently had a very similar problem with a machine that had previously been working. It turned out to be a bad hard drive. Each time the PC would reboot from the setup, the main board would fail to detect the hard drive. Yet when it booted from the CD it was there for the Installer to find and format. Just about drove me crazy until I realized it just wasn't being detected, and then it was and then it wasn't and so on. Just coincidence that it could be seen when the installer got to it. I think I would try to get my hands on a floppy drive and plug it into the board temporaily and copy the cd to the hard drive. Then start the install from there. Nice that we don't need those useless floppies anymore eh? Thanks Dell, thanks Gateway.

Member Avatar for Catweazle

When the system reboots during the install, you're not pressing a key to boot from CD-ROM are you?

Member Avatar for the taxidermist

i got it all figured out now, it turns out that some how in this hole mess there was a bad partition. my 80gig drive had a 75gig partition and a 200gig!!! i took a flopy from my drum synth and wrote zeros to the front of the drive ( where the partition info is kept). so im all good now. thanks much to everyone

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