Problem installing XP on new hard drive

[josbd]

I have just installed a new 250gig hard drive on a friend's computer. It is an XP Athlon 1600, 512 RAM, Gigabyte board.

Initially it happily booted from the XP disk, and I got as far as partitioning, changed my mind on the size of partition, exited out without saving the partition. Now it will not boot from the disk, simply boots normally and comes up with a screen which says PXE-EC8 !PXE structure not found in UNDI.

Can anyone help me with this one please??

 

[fastco]

Can you boot from a Windows XP disk? I would do that, delete the partition. create a new partition, format and install XP again...

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Maybe the easiest solution, would be to download a Windows 98se boot floppy from HERE and Fdisk the drive.

Then, using the XP disk repartition the drive and reformat in the NTFS file system.

Regards Howard

 

[josbd]

That is the prob, it simply will not boot from disk.

Cheers Howard. Shall try that one.

 

[kangaruffian]

Update BIOS! Or if u use FBOOT bootagent unload it.

 

[josbd]

Excellent! Thanks Howard. Better add another pint to the gallons I already owe you!

 

[josbd]

OK, I have installed XP and SP2. I set an original partition of 50mb which I installed onto.

I now have a prob in that it will not recognise the rest of the hard drive. I know this is a fairly common problem, so I googled it. Went to the registry and could not see EnableBigLba in Atapi/Parameters. I therefore wrote a new DWord ant set the value at 1.

Still no joy.

I seem to remember that there was some kind of small tool which you could use to enable the use of larger hard drives.

Any further help would be most gratefully received.

Thanks

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Take a look HERE it may help with the hard drive size problem.

Regards Howard

 

[josbd]

Well, it has WinXP SP 2 installed, I have updated the BIOS, and I downloaded and ran a Maxtor tool, which tells me that it is already 48 bit enabled.

Board is a Gigabyte 7VTXE 1.x; the drive is a Western WD2500JB Digital Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM ATA/100 8MB Cache

I ran Western Digital's Data Lifeguard tool, which only shows the Windows Installation partition on the HDD

Hair. Tearing. Out!!!

 

[howard_hopkinso]

I`m afraid I can`t think of anything else at the moment.

Maybe someone else will have some better ideas.

Regards Howard

 

[josbd]

Thanks for your help Howard. Very much appreciate, as always.

Think tis time for unstressing with a cold beer and thinking again tomorrow.

 

[josbd]

And, bloody rude of me:

Thanks too, to Kangaruffian, and Fastco for your advice!