Need to reformat SATA & then install XP... patient tech's help needed :)

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The time has come for my ritual drive reformatting...only the last time I did this was eight years ago, and with an IDE HD. <:/ I don't even know where to begin with cooking my SATA drive, although I have managed to load the drivers for the HD onto a floppy, along with the driver for my motherboard onto another floppy.

Having gone through all the documentation I can find, it's still as clear as mud to me... could anyone with a metric ton of patience give me a few pointers?

I'm not sure if I need to:

1. reboot the machine, access the BIOS and somehow tell it to boot from the windows OEM cd i've got in my dvd drive (although i thought i had done this, but apparently not!) to reformat from.

2. Boot to the c: prompt somehow, and start the reformatting procedure from there. Only i believe that windows XP's lack of SATA drivers may well prevent this..?

I do know the drive is formatted to NTFS, so i believe i have to reformat with a specific parameter... not entirely sure on this either,though.

I'm just not sure where to start the great Reformat! Anybody who could point me in the right direction will be doing their karma no end of good :)
 
OK, I've solved the prob with a friend's help

There's some kind of conflict with the USB keyboard I'm using. Ie., it's preventing me from booting up from my cd drive or using the keys when i try running the windows XP setup utility. And, my ps2 ports wouldnt work when we originally put it together, so it looks like this reformat is going to the dogs.

why, oh why, did i ever trash my Mac <:/
 
I have had the same problem with keyboards. expensive microsoft keyboard always give me problems so I keep a cheapo PS\2 keyboard around for installs that always works like a charm. you could try using a USB to PS\2 adapter that often works too.
 
Keyboards

Yeah, luckily i found a PS2 adaptor on sunday and managed to cook it's goose. So lucky that a mate had had the same problem, otherwise i would never have figured it to be something so totally unrelated as a keyboard issue..!!!
 
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