Drive 0 seek failure, but then boots. help!

[bender73]

hello. very long story short, i installed a new SATA WD 320gb HD because the old one was fried. first time i did this. after hours i finally got XP to see the SATA drive. i had to rip out a 3.5" floppy drive from an old PC. i had to use F5 and F6 during the XP install.

finally, it works! i was all excited.

now, i have a problem, but it's like in reverse. initially, the Bios saw the new drive, but not XP. now, the Bios sees it under "set-up," but i get a drive 0 seek failure. i hit F1 to continue and it boots to XP Pro fine.

thoughts?

i am a Noob and i feel like i am sooo close to solving this. thanks!

 

[eyeCpc]

You left the optical set as the first in the boot order. You have to go back into the bios to see hard drive set as first there.

One tip for installing Windows is to simply leave the hard drive set as first and use the F1 key there to boot from the optical drive long enough to see the setup files unpacked onto the hard drive until the initial restart. With the hard drive already set as the default you don't have to make repeat trips into the bios.

 

[bender73]

fixed.

it was a "diskette" drive 0 seek failure. my hard drive is at location 0, so that confused me. i used the 3.5" floppy for drivers, and then removed it from the PC after install. i disabled the floppy in the bios and now it boots fine.

...and they were gonna charge like $400 to do all this at the local computer store!

 

[eyeCpc]

You forgot! you forgot the floppy being set as first in the order. It's always something simple.

I think everyone has seen that once or twice while the smart thing was not getting ripped off at some store! If you forget a disk left in a floppy drive and boot... "what? I forgot to take the floppy out...:" and quickly press the reset button while popping the disk out.

Would you believe I still have a floppy drive installed here? Not that I will see much use out of it I threw it in just in case I needed to rawrite or some other Linux or dos tool. The floppy search is kept disabled.