Lady needing help with SATA drive please!!!!

[catswinnie]

Hi

I am a complete novice. installed a new SATA drive it was working fine but then computer started crashing/freezing. BIOS keeps showing the drive as primary and secondary slave and ATAPI CD ROM shows as primary and secondary master. The drive is also partitioned. I want to install brand new copy of XP home onto this drive and remove partitions. How do i do a complete format on this drive as when i have tried before i have ended up with the PC saying i have two versions of windows on the system?????? Also how do i set the BIOS straight? the drive is connected to the sata port on my motherboard (AsRock K7NF2-RAID). Please help i am at my wits end and close to stampng all over the thing. Have tried posting this on seagate forum but had no replies. :cry: Drive is Seagate barracuda 7200.7

[El Wayneo]

Hi,

Sounds like a corrupted install of XP maybe.

All you need to do get your XP CD put it in your CD/DVD device.

Restart your Computer, you need to go into the BIOS menu and set it to BOOT from CD/DVD device.

Normally press delete when PC restarts, then look for BOOT menu/options.

Then press save and exit.

It should say booting from CD then you it will load files.

After that you need to pick enter setup.

It will ask where to install XP, if you already have C: or D: or whatever partitions and want to get rid off them then simply click on the partition and delete, do the same for any other other partitions.

Then create a new partition.

REMEMBER THIS WILL DELETE EVERYTHING OFF THE HARD DRIVE.

Goodluck.

Not sure about the BIOS as it should pick it up as SATA unless your board has SATA 150 and the HDD is 300 could be the problem with crashing as well if the drivers aren't loaded at setup.

[Aaron]

As it is a SATA drive, you may also need to give the windows install the drivers for the SATA controller, so dont panic if it doesnt see the drive to begin with :)

Try it as El Wayneo said tho, as some windows disks (with SP2 included, I think) will recognise SATA controllers out of the box :)

[coiler]

if your windows disk is only SP1 you will have to slipstream the SP2 onto the same disk which isn't the easiest thing to do

[wonderlust]

lol get nlite and it is very easy to slipstream sp2 or 3.

http://www.nliteos.com/

[coiler]

lol get nlite and it is very easy to slipstream sp2 or 3.

http://www.nliteos.com/


not if "I am a complete novice" :mrgreen:

[Aaron]

F6 + Floppy disk? :)

[tystar]

F6 + Floppy disk? :)

Floppy Disk ???? WTF what are they??

[Aaron]

:lol:

[catswinnie]

cheers guys for your help will try this tomorrow and if no luck will come back to you:thumbsup: