Installing XP issues (if you don't help I'll be forced to use Vista)

[king vash]

When i go to install xp on my new rig (c2d e6750, with IP-35) it works great on the "Press any key to continue..." then loads the blue screen I select the partition, format it, load the files, and reboots just like normal. but when it goes to load it (just after "boot from cd:") it just displays 3 random characters randomly placed on the screen.
I got BartsPe, Vista, a Ubuntu live cd all to work but not xp (tried 32 bit, 64 bit, home, and pro) what's up?

Also my second hard drive (a 300 gig sata drive) is acting weird. I watched a movie on it (so i know it worked at one point) then in BartsPe I formated my primary hard drive (164 gig Pata). now all i see on the secondary drive is maybe 300 folders and only about 30 files in the first folder, it's exactly 399MB, I tried switching the hard drive mode, CHS, LBA, Large, auto and none worked. The drive used to be in Large mode, so I tried a data recovery tool in large mode and it can recover about 80% of the data, but i was hoping i could save it all. be advised I could have tried something and it worked and I just missed it.

Any advice for either issue would be much appreciated

 

[Trotter]

As for the XP, check the disk to see if it is dirty or smudged or scratched.

The other... I dunno.

 

[KSoD]

Well the XP disc sounds like it is scratched or your system isnt booting into the 2nd part. Go with Trotter's advise above as it is the best.

As for your drive i will warn you now. XP and a IDE/SATA setup are dangerous combos at best.

It could be that all that switching for drive modes is what caused this issues. It could be in large mode it sall all the data but once you switched it some of the data was lost. The only thing you can do there is if you are lucky use recovery software. Since you said you got about 80% of it already then you are probably gonna get all that you can.

 

[king vash]

I used xp with a IDE\SATA combo and had no problems but you think it might help if i unplug my sata till i'm done? and also what's the best recovery software out their, i'm using irecovery 3.0 with BartsPE

 

[KSoD]

Well i have seen many issues arise from IDE.SATA combos with XP. You might just be lucky. But trying to dual boot with a OS on each is tricky at the best to get working.

I would suggest at least trying to unplug the SATA.

As for the recovery. There are thousands of apps out there. Panda Recovery is a free one. There is a bunch more. I havent had to use them so i dont know which is the best.

 

[king vash]

I had all 4 gigs of my ram installed by removing 3 gigs (all but one stick) I was able to install xp successfully still looking into recovery

 

[KSoD]

Ahh you never mentioned you had 4GB of RAM. I would have started off with that.