Bad CD-Rom or HD?

[Nubius]

Aright, so I got my secondary all pieced together and all that good stuff. Now let me tell you. The two hard drives I have is one that's from a 4-5 year old peoplePC intel computer that's only 10gb don't even know what brand. Got it formatted fine. Other hard drive, is a western digital 8gb drive that was out of my old xbox In the BIOS it recognized both drives and before I got the boot sequence set to CD it tried to boot up win98. Anyhow...upon installing all the files and where you're at the complete blue screen and it says 'Setup is starting up windows' It just sits there. I've tried 2 cd-rom drives, both of which suck and are old so I'm thinking that may be the problem. The first drive couldn't read all the setup files off the disk, but the other cd-rom (also out of my grandmas old comp) finishes the setup files way faster. But then it too freezes at 'Setup is starting up windows'

Anyone have any speculations? Could it be that the CD-rom drives suck or that one of the HD's is causing it to mess up? But if that is the case why would it recognize them both in the BIOS just fine. Thanks

 

[cricket]

Nubius,

There are a couple of reasons for this;

1. Yes, both your CD-ROMS could be bad, or the transfer rate might not be able to keep up with your system bus speed.

2. You have two drives sharing a cable that run at two differant bus speeds, this could cause a conflit in Windows.

The BIOS is not picky, it just ask the drives what they are. Windows is very picky, it likes to setup one bus speed and run at that.

Hope this helps,
-=Cricket=-

 

[Nubius]

Ahh yes this was indeed helpful. Well I tried just the XBOX HD, but with the first bad cd-rom only, don't think I've tried x-box with cd-rom that finished reading setup files. and I don't think I've tried just the old 10gb HD on the good cd-rom so I guess I gotta mix and match. It would make sense for the Xbox to not work being that it came out of a completely different system, but surely even the old HD out of that peoplePC machine should still be able to work in here. Thanks cricket and welcome to the forums!

Any other ideas anyone? I'll let you know if the above mix and match winds up working

 

[Nubius]

Yeah, I used the Old HD and Old Cd-rom (old cd-rom = good cd-rom that worked) and it started the setup! Formatting right now actually! Thanks cricket. Stupid me, that should have been basic instinct to mix and match bah. Never thought about different system bus speeds especially since it came from an Xbox. Thanks again!

 

[mre30]

Glad that you got it working. I was thinking about just turing my xbox in to a pc

 

[cricket]

Glad I could help out