Can't Install XP

One other thing... Check www.bootdisk.com they have some links that will help

 

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Another way around this problem (if you were wanting to do what Stryder suggested) is to download this
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...oftware Downloads/Top Downloads&downloadID=19


This is the CD for setting up Maxtor hard drives-- however, a few of the features on the CD can be used with ANY hard drive. One of which is the ability to cleanly format a drive (the feature on the CD is called "zero fill drive").

Of course, I could be wrong, and there is a way to *easily* create a bootable CD version of the win98 boot disk. I seem to remember the CD burner program 'Nero burning rom' having a method where you could do this- I have no clue how it works though.

 

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Just before that..

It appears when I get the cdboot: ntldr cannot be found message on boot, if i press enter really quickly, the blue dos screen for windows xp setup still loads.

now. i want to get rid of my preexisting windows and clean install a new one. but when i try to select the partition with my c: drive, setup tells me that there is an existing operating system (windows) on the partition, and that installing another operating system on the same partition is highly unrecommended.

So. I was under the impression that if you selected a partition to install windows xp on, the partition would be formatted before installation. i guess this is not true?

i have tried selecting the 'delete partition' option to delete c: but setup says that i can't because some setup files have been stored on the partition.

how can i go about clean installing in peace??? i don't want a situation where i format the partition only to discover that installing windows is not an option because errors continue to come up, leaving my laptop as a doorstop.

 

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It can be a tricky one, if you have an NTFS partition currently then a commandline method of deleting the WINDOWS folder is made more difficult because of how NTFS is, if it's FAT32 then you can quite happily delete the windows folder, without it the system can't detect an OS and can get on with formatting it.

From bootdisk.com came the link for here:
http://www.theeldergeek.com/formatting_drives_using_xp_cd.htm

This should give you a rundown of how to get rid of your old partition and create a new one.

 

i have a similar utility for my western digital drive and it fits on a floppy.
although it can detect any drive on your system it will only work for western digital drives.

about zero fill.
expect for this process to take HOURS. my wd drive (80 GB) would take 6 hours to zero fill.

 

Stryder, that link does not help me because the XP cd itself does not allow me to delete the partition, the reason being that I started the install in Windows and so the setup files have been copied onto that very partition. so i need some other utility which i can burn to cd (i dont have floppies) and use to get rid of the partition. and once i do get that utility, i have to figure out if im deleting or formatting the partition (if the two operations are not the same).

i am not versed in formatting programs and so on and the bootdisk site has so many options, so that I do not know which one is right for me. besides which, most of them seem to be for floppies.

 

you have me totally confused.
the XP cd that you have has options to delete partitions and format your drive.
if these options are not available then you have an OEM release of XP.

 

I said the option of deleting the partition is THERE but I can't select it because it says I can't delete the partition because the Windows setup files have been copied there. So either I figure out how to delete the Windows setup files (which would be a lot nicer), or I find an alternate way of just formatting everything.

 

Okay what I suggest after a little digging around in my old archive of bootfiles is going to www.freedos.org and downloading and burning the ISO to a CD (at no more than x4 speed for safety measures)

It shouldn't take to long, my version of freeDOS was approx 11mb in size.

freeDOS contains both FDISK (For creating/manipulating partitions) and FORMAT for formating them. You should find it bootable and it should allow you to clean your drive of everything that was already there.

What you do is boot up, let it get to commandline after it loads drivers etc. Once there type FDISK, it will take you into a partition system. Make sure you remove all current partitions before creating a new one. Once you've done that you might have to restart the computer for the partition table to be saved. Keep the FreeDOS disc in the drive and reboot back to command line...

You'll then have to type FORMAT C: (which I hope is the only partition you create for simplicity) the program will then format that partition.

Once thats done, reboot with your XP disc.

You should then find that your installation will no longer suggest there is anything more wrong with the drive, and it should go about attempting to do its own format and converting the drive from FAT32 to NTFS.

 

go to the hard drive manufacturers website and downlowd the drives formatting and partitioning utilities. burn the files to a cd-r then boot your machine with it.
it will give you the options you need.
you will need the drives name and model number to download the utilities.
if asked to format your drive choose quick format and ntfs

 

i installed a floppy drive on my computer when i bought incase i wanted to install winME on it. i also have a boot floppy created in winME which has fdisk and format on it. i could not get fdisk to function properly with the ntfs partitions, i said i had a mbr error.
it worked fine for fat 32 partitions though.

 

Indeed FDISK in this instance won't cover NTFS, however thats where the XP disc will deal with the formatting. The entire use of FDISK is just to get rid of the problem data from the drive.

 

Can you use FDISK to delete an NTFS partition? Or will it simply not see it.

 

the drives will show up in the fdisk app. but the total disk size reported for the drive doesn't match the actual size. keep in mind i am talking about fdisk created by winME.
on a clean install of XP i suggest going to the drive makers website and using their disk utilities.

i find it odd that WD would name their format and partitioning software 'data protector' when in fact it's data destroyer.

 

Hmm.. Panic mode. Ok I erased the old partition and created a new one and then formatted. Now I'm getting the same ntldr message, except that the windows cd isn't loading..

edit: well scratch that, i guess my computer really is retarded. i plopped in about three of the windows xp copies i made since last night and finally the blue setup screen came. right now, im doing a full ntfs format on c:.

Here's to praying nothing else goes wrong..

 

The maxtor CD has an option called "zero fill- quick" which does it in about 10 seconds.
I think the hour long version is if you wanted to totally and completely wipe out the drive of all existing data to the point where the drive was literally filled with 0s. The quick method removes the table on the hard drive that says where all the data is located (meaning it's still there, but overwritten as the drive is filled to capacity). The long slow version of zero fill does exectly what it says (fills the drive with real zeroes mening the drive is *literally* blank and raw).

 

well southstar? we're all on the edge of our seats waiting . . .

 

Hey I built a new computer from scrach and when I try to instal windows a blue screen pops up saying windows is be shut down to prevent damage. and it says dumping hardrive. I set my bios to default settins. Tried using repair. and tried saving over the other portion. Please Help!!!!

 

Sorry guys. I couldn't get it fixed before I left home but I need a little more help.

I think my problem was that the CD drive was worn out. I bought an (expensive) 1 GB memory stick to replace the worthless SDRAM only to find that the errors persisted. I formatted, deleted, and remade partitions until the hard drive was a maze. And yet the copy errors persisted. But today I tried cleaning the lens with a wet cotton bud (again) (couldn't think of anything safer to use) and the install went through for the most part, just a few copy errors. The big problem is that drivers.cab simply refused to be copied during the install regardless of which Windows XP cd i put into the CD drive. I have now burnt 30-40 copies of four different versions of Windows XP and none of them have done the job flawlessly. To put the story short, I skipped drivers.cab so that setup could go on copying the files to the hard drive but now I need someone to tell me how to manually copy drivers.cab to the hard drive because the keyboard, mouse, and so on aren't working when i enter the windows install. at least i've gotten past the damn blue dos screen and i'm seeing some visuals now but help me get past this hurdle.

oh, and somehow the cd door is jammed and won't open so i'm stuck with a doubly worthless computer that can't read CDs. i'll try to fix that in the meantime but i'm sure someone here knows how to manually copy the file to the hard drive and where to copy it to.


really, i would just buy a new computer but all the money went into my $1400 desktop which is sitting back home.. It could also be the hard drive but I checked the hard drive with HDD Regenerator and no errors were found. The CD drive whirrs and clicks and scrapes like its dying an awful lot before copying a file though.

oh, and i'm considering buying an inexpensive external cd burner from newegg.com. if any of you are familiar with that place and can recommend one for me i'll be very grateful. This one doesn't look too bad and I'm hoping the read quality is as good as the write quality is. My current joke of a burner reads and writes in one, but can't even read RW discs. I'm not sure if my laptop, an HP Pavilion zx5000, supports USB 2.0 but the online HP manual claims it does.

 

I' having a really big problem on xp aswel its sending me crazy. I am trying to re-install Windows XP Professional onto my computer. Here is some history. The version that was previously on there had some errors so i decided to start from scratch regretting it now. So I have formatted the computer, and everything works fine there. The windows setuip files copy, and the computer restarts. When it restarts to begin the installation, and it gets to the WIndows XP screen, the little blue status bar goes accross a couple of times, then just freezes. I have tried this several times, and always the same result. I have also disconnected my DVD Burner and Floppy Dick Drive, so that there is less hardware to detect during installation. This has made no difference, as it just prolonges the computer freezing. Can any1 plaz help i really dont know what to do im not an expert on computers. Thankyou.