I post this question in XP because I'm trying to get a Hard drive to go back to XP on two PCs I would like to think of myself as a intelligent person but this makes me feel stupid.
I have a HDD that was formated and loaded with vista. Now nothing else has been able to touch it. Partition commander, paragon partition manager. active kill disk. I've Tried everything 30 or so programs. XP will format and install fine but not boot.
Any help would be appreciated.
There should be no problem booting from your Windows XP CD in recovery mode and using FDISK to reset your partitions etc.
ANd then move forward. Or is that what you did? FDISK is important to be rid of Vista.
Say we delete the partitions and format. I stick it in a computer and load XP. After installing the os and on the desktop, I go to re-boot.
"No OS found"
Look at it with another computer the system is there just fine. Fdisk does not fix. Inserting the Xp cd and Fdisk does not fix. Do an overlay and it does not fix it. lol
Could it be that when It had Vista on it the partitions on the drive were GTP and not MBR?
The sequence I was recommending was to use the FDISK off the XP CD.
On the second PC you could low level format the HDD with the utility downloaded from the manufacturer's support site. Then FDISK, then Format then take it to the first PC and set Windows up.
If that doesn't work I'm stumped.
under vista what is the file sysem on the hdd,
@bobbyraw - its NTFS man.
@Suspishio - I used the F-disk off the disk and off the other computer ( which is vista )
A system with Xp will not recognize the disk as a formatted drive and will not let me format.
Ill try everything again. Just an attempt to save a friend from buying another HDD.
Thanks -----------------------(by the way I used the command prompt to try to convert
from GPT to MBR and the system claimed
that it was already MBR)
run the hddd manufacturer cd utility on the hdd, write zero's if u have to but start there make sure that the drive is setup to hold an opearting system then run fdisk then format. am ensure the jumper match the hdd config, master, master with slave and so on.
OK it won't recognize the disk wtf.
I knew other boot utilities wouldn't touch the drive but I kind of expected The WD utility to. killing the disk now with active kill disk. It finally recognized it.
13 hours left just to delete the partition. lol
Lets see if this works???!! lol
Try this :
Boot From Windows XP CD and then go to recovery mode by pressing "R" when asked you .
in recovery mode type these commands :
1 . fixboot
2 . fixmbr
Killing the disk still didn't work. I tried fixboot and fixmbr, both seemed to do something. After that I could install xp but it would not reboot.(OS not found on screen)
Out of pure frustration I used another HDD and loaded XP, Then I Cloned the fresh working install to the old HDD. Works fine for now, I hope it stays up. lol. Even tough the problem is simi fixed I would still like to know why this happened. This is the third time that I know of that this happened. I know that they messed around with the partition tables, but shouldn't be nothing major just adding a partition or taking one away. I don't know what could of happened.
Thanks for the help guys. If you hear anything similar or find out what may have caused it please let me know
---thanks
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