Installin Win OS

[shiv_skanda]

I am having problems installing Windows XP on my PC. I recently built my PC and I wanted to install WinXp OS on it. The problem is though I indicate CDROM as the first boot option, the computer reads the CDROM for sometime and then quits without doing anything. The screen is hanged at the position of the "Boot From CD:" .

Any suggestion, do you think if my hard disk not alright this may be an issues. Please suggest on what I should do, I have good reason to belive my CD is fine and also when I boot using MSDOS floppy diskette, what drive letter is given to my CDROm. How do I know that?

Shiv

 

[Nodsu]

You usually see the drive letter when MSCDEX is being run.

 

[toffeapple]

I would double check the XP cd on another pc just to be sure I had this happen to me before....even doh it doesnt look damaged it probably is

 

[shiv_skanda]

Hi Nodsu,
How do I get the MSCDEX file to run.
I dont see it among the files on my floppy drive from which I boot. How do I get it there?

 

[Nodsu]

Are you sure your floppy actually has CDROM support on it? The MSDOS boot floppy you get from the format utility does not copy any drivers. Get the WIn98SE custom boot floppy from www.bootdisk.com.

 

[Samstoned]

try cleaning the disc
sounds like it's trying to read and is hanging on cd
reset the cmos bios to optimum default or just default
disable boot from other devices (if you can).
make sure the cdrom is master on ide 2.
circular scratchs on disc are harder to correct than linear ones.

 

[shiv_skanda]

I did use the boot disk you mentioned in your post and fortunately it detectd the CDROM. I am going on to CDROM in dos mode and it was given R drive. Then i went into the folder which had the setup. It is an .exe file. So, i ran the file hoping it would run and setup Win.
But now the problem is when I run the Setup it says : "Windows Setup Requires 15728640 bytes available on C drive." I have a 120 GB hard disk fixed in & its being deteced in BIOS also. I tried using fail safe default option in CMOS too but it just aint working. Please advice on what to do next. I tried to format but it gets stuck while trying to format it.
Please help.

Shiv

 

[Nodsu]

You need a FAT32 partition and you cannot format one bigger than 32GB. A good idee is to create the partition where you will install Windows (not spanning the whole disk) but not format it. Then create another partition smaller than 32GB after that one and format as FAT32. This way you can install Windows to the first partition in the native NTFS format. You can do whatever you want with the scratch partition later on.

 

[shiv_skanda]

Re: Installing Win OS

Hi Nodsu,

Thanks for the reply.
Well, I will have to use fdisk to do the partioning and I had given all that the OS can detect to the primary DOS partition. So, you mean to say that I have to create a primay partition of less then 32 GB
(say 10GB) and then give the rest to Extended partition.

Please confirm my understanding.

Shiv

 

[Nodsu]

Better create the first primary partition as 100GB unformatted and then the rest as the small FAT32 partition. You can make the second partition primary too if you like.

Or rethink your partitioning completely and have more than two partitions with specific purposes.