Trouble with installing WinXP Pro

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Ok. My drive is a Maxtor. I did the diagnostic and everything came up clean. I then did the quick erase and it went clean.

I then tried to to boot from the XP cd and it wouldn't boot!!

"press F1 to retry boot, prees F2 to go to system blahhhh ."

I am obviously clueless. I would like to think that all of the hardware is at least partly functional. So is it the disk? It brought up the install screen through windows.

I know there is probable crucial info that I am leaving out. Just ask and I'll try my best.


Anything would be great
 
houndofspace said:
Ok, I need help.

I've recently decided to reformat the hard drive on my computer.
I'm currently running XP home, but have acquired XP pro and want to install it.

I put in the XP pro install disk and let it auto restart my comp. It tries to boot from the disk. It goes to the blue screen and says:
-hit F6 to install any third party RAID or SCSI controllers
-hit F2 to begin WIndows Automatic Recovery

after it scrolls through those, it begins to pull files from the CD. But a few seconds later this error screen comes up.

So I restart my comp and check for viruses.. none. I then do the
chkdsk /f thing.

The error message returned:

The type of file sytem is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive
CHKDSK cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)

I picked yes and it did nothing after i restarted my comp.


The reason I am reformatting is to just clean a lot of junk off of the drive. There is no problem with it that I can tell.

So, what am I looking at here? Is the drive corrupt?

Help please and thanks

I just realized. you are not booting off of the xp cd. that was part of your problem.

hit a key to boot from cd when you turn on the computer
 
No. Sorry. my language is ambiguous at best.

By boot from the disk i meant boot from the cd. It just doesn't work.
 
Could be bad RAM. It seems like you got the CD to boot before, but now it won't. Just to be sure, do you have the CD before the HD in your boot priority?
 
Yes. And I also tried to boot directly from the disk drive. I can boot MS-DOS directly from the a: and I could access the windows installation on the cd through Windows. But now that windows is absent from my machine, I can only boot from the a: or d:. I also have a second dvd drive, but I can't figure out how to boot from it.
 
Maybe it's a bad CD/DVD drive that you are using. You can try the second DVD drive, set it as the master and put it on the Master IDE connector to replace the first CD/DVD drive and try from there.
 
Alright. Getting somewhere. I changed the IDE cables and made my other dvd drive the master. It booted the windows cd, but it said that it didn't recogize a hard drive on my comp. I guess this means i need to format the hard drive....
 
Not really, if your harddrive is SATA or SCSI you'll have to press F6 to load your HD driver. If it's not supported you may have to maybe download the driver from the manufacture and put it on a floppy.
 
called Maxtor up and the service guy said that he's not sure that there is a driver for the drive. This was after he spent a good 10 minutes searching the site which I had just searched.

My drive is a Maxtor Maxline Plus II (model # 7y250m0)

If anyone can find a suitable driver, I'd be glad.

The service guy said that i need to get Maxblast 4 and partition the drive, then windows will recognize it.

Any thoughts?
 
Probably will work. I don't know never done it like that. Anyways I just wanted to know did XP Home come with your computer installed? I wonder how XP Home detected the drive, probably because it came with SP2 or someone or the manufacturer had installed it. You probably have an older XP Pro installation. The one with SP2 should be able to detect it. Also is this a SATA drive or IDE?
 
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