Help - New Hard-Drive, Win XP won't complete install

maxheadroom

Hi everyone,


I just got me a new 80GB hard disc (Seagate Barracuda V) and decided to install it as my primary HDD. My old setup was:
IDE1 Master: 40GB HDD
IDE1 Slave: DVD-ROM
IDE2 Master : CDRW

New setup is :
IDE1 Master: 80GB HDD
IDE1 Slave: DVD-ROM
IDE2 Master : CDRW
IDE2 Slave: 40GB HDD

PC has an AMD athlon XP 2000+, 256MB DDR, 64MB GeForce4 MX420, creatix modem/firewire combo card, realtek ethernet card. SB PCI64 onboard.

I tried to do a fresh install of WinXP home edition. It didn't work. It copied all the necessary files to the HDD, rebooted and did the install routine. Then it rebooted again, and it sat there and eventually the screen turned black.

I then removed the power cable from the 40GB drive and tried again. This semed to do a little better, but it still fell over and died.

Then I tried installing Linux (Mandrake 9.0). Linux is working fine - and while this may be the incident to push me into using linux full time, the rest of my family isn't quite ready to make that call.

Current partition setup is:

80Gb (hda):
9.6GB NTFS (WinXP)
39GB FAT32 (containing backups from the 40GB disk)
5.3Gb ext3 (/)
243MB Swap
19Gb ext3 (/home)

40GB (hdd)
24GB FAT32 (empty)
16GB Blank (future home for linux)

Windows will start in safe mode (with both drives connected), not in diagnostic startup, not in safe mode with networking and not in VGA only mode.

I cannot get windows to go through the final part of setup (setting up users, activating windows etc)

I am well and truly stumped by this, I have been working on this since about 4pm.

Please, please help...

maxheadroom

All drives are fine in the bios. Both ATA100 drives are running at ATA100, both optical devices are running at ATA33, so it doesn't sound like a cable problem either.

To be honest, I haven't tried only one drive + DVD-ROM - I don't want to have to yank out the cables, its a micro-ATX box and its fiddly getting them back in.

But, Linux is running absolutely fine, and the only hardware change is that extra HDD.

Spunj

Have you set the main partition on the new master to "Active"?

I have seen some strange behaviour related to this. Open fdisk and make sure theres an "A" against it.

maxheadroom

yep - all is as it should be regarding the settings.


After another day of tinkering, I have spotted two potential problems:

Dodgy network card driver taking forever to query cable modem for IP address

Dodgy connection to IDE1 Slave - when I disconnected power from the dvd rom drive, it worked fine.


Gonna have another look at the cabling - funny thing is that I bought a new cable for the Primary IDE channel...

Snaga

What kind of psu have you got in the case? 200w, 300w? Maybe theres just not enough juice for all of the devices youve got there with a load on the cpu or some such silliness.

marauder

Unlikely to fix your problem but I recommend putting the 2 HDDs on IDE 1 and the 2 Optical drives on IDE 2. Mixing ATA100 and ATA33 devices on the same channel is never a good idea...

maxheadroom

Originally posted by marauder
Unlikely to fix your problem but I recommend putting the 2 HDDs on IDE 1 and the 2 Optical drives on IDE 2. Mixing ATA100 and ATA33 devices on the same channel is never a good idea...

Hmmm - I thought it was a bad idea to slave a CD-RW off a DVD-ROM, buggers things up if you try to do a direct copy.


It would make the cabling a little easier though .


The problem seems to be with the DVD rom drive, it's working now though - I reseated all the cables and switched it to PIO mode in Windows (windows was the only thing having a problem with it - I could boot off it and Linux was working fine)


Anyway, it all seems to be working now, so I'm happy

aidan_dunne

From my own experience, what marauder and RicardoSmith says makes sense. Install your 80GB HDD as Master on the Primary channel and then install the 40GB drive as Slave on the Primary channel.

Install your CDRW as Master on the Secondary channel and your DVD as Slave on the Secondary channel. I do this thing all the time and I've never had any problems.

Basically, put your two hard drives together on the Primary channel with your main one as Master and put your two optical drives together on the Secondary channel with the CDRW as Master as you'll have less problems when it comes to burning if it's a Master drive.

See if that works. If not.... well..... ask someone else!

And snaga's right, make sure you've got a big enough PSU to give all those little beasties plenty of juice.