Trouble with installing XP Home

Tim

I'm fixing an HP Desktop, a Pavilion 7845 with an 866 P3 in it. The old 40 GB hard drive had died, so I got a new 320 GB Western Digital internal IDE drive.

Using my XP SP1 boot CD, I got it started installing, and it did a full NTFS format of the new hard drive.

Now.... nothing.

Whenever I restart the computer, if I don't press a key to boot from CD, it says "disk read error", and that's all it'll do. I have to hit Crtl-Alt-Delete to get it going.

If I DO press a key to boot from CD, I get the message that "Setup is inspecting my computer's hardware configuration", and then.... nothing. Black screen until I restart it.

This has been very frustrating. Could the new hard drive be bad? It was the only hard drive in the computer, so it got the XP boot CD full NTFS format to start it off, not the CD that came with the new hard drive.

Thrax

Can you use the utility that comes with the hard drive to make the first partition on the drive 120GB, then attempt to install again?

Tim

Tried using the utility CD before & after the XP boot CD.

It doesn't do anything except give me text on the black screen. It seems to start, then gives me the A< (something like that) prompt. I type in "setup", and it gives an error.

Stupid Western Digital POS, this is why I only use Seagate drives in my own computers and they work great.:banghead:

Thrax

It has nothing to do with the hard drive. They virtually all use the same controller chip; more than likely it's the ancient HP computer freaking out at the massive hard drive.

And you say the XP disc is bootable? You never get to the blue screen? And you're sure CD-ROM is set to first boot, and you've cleared the BIOS and jumpered the drive correctly?

Tim

I cleared the bios jumper (I think that was it), I pulled the CMOS battery for a few minutes also.

Made sure the boot sequence was set to CD for #1 and hard drive for #2.

On the main page of the BIOS screen (Phoenixbios), under Primary Master, it says "137439MB" instead of the name of the drive.

BIOS core version is 4.06, Release 6.0, BIOS version is 2.07, dated 3/9/01.

XP boot CD is an original Dell boot CD. XP Home SP1.

On the Advanced screen, under "installed O/S", it was on Win98/2000, I changed it to "other" and that didn't help.

I did have the drive on its default jumpers for cable select. Removed the jumper to make it the master drive in a single drive computer, that didn't help.

If this hard drive is just plain too big, I can exchange it. If that's the case, would it HAVE to use a drive smaller than 137 GB?

Thrax

If you have a copy of Nero and some time, you can make a new disc from the original updated to SP2, which might solve many of the problems:

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/windowsxp/winxp-sp2-bootcd.html

Tim

Don't have Nero. And I just go to microsoft.com and also use Windows Update to get the updates in when fixing / updating my own systems.

Is this hard drive too big to be used in this HP computer? I thought it was odd that it showed the Primary Master as "137439MB" instead of as an actual name.

Thrax

It <i>might</i> be. The eccentricities of large drives and old computers are hard to navigate; I'd say it's very likely that it's too big, since the BIOS isn't capable of detecting the full 320GB. This means the PC doesn't have 48bit LBA, which means it probably is misreading and therefore misusing the drive. Stick with a 120GB or less, and things should probably be okay.

Tim

OK I'll do that. Thanks.