windows xp setup won't finish?

[UT03]

Ok, So I took one of my extra hard drives and partioned it thru windows xp setup and am trying to use it as the boot partion. So it does it's thing and after the boot where it installs all of the setup files it is supposed to go to the graphical interface that sets your keyboard, language and all that stuff.

However, after the restart, the graphical interface does not show up and instead, it starts the inital setup where it copies the setup files again. I have tried to repair using the repair console and it sees that installation is already present on that partition and asks me about dual booting. I tried to format again thru dos, but it continues to do the same thing where it won't make it past the first boot.

Any ideas?

 

[CaptainObvious]

maybe your CDROM is before the HD in the boot sequence. try taking the install disc out of the CDROM and restarting.

 

[YChang]

did you do a scandisk? Maybe bad sector on hdd.

 

[RaizerAlum]

Mind the Captain....he speaks the truth. Is the cd out of the drive when you reboot?

 

[UT03]

Yeah, I pull the cd out of the drive and I get an error message like:
invalid boot, insert installation cd

I'm at work so I can't remember exactly what the message said. I'm gonna try and get it done tonight. I have double checked my jumper settings on the windows drive and it is set to master. I have another hard drive that has all my files on and I'm pretty sure the jumpers are correct on it. Thanks so far for the help.

 

[CaptainObvious]

well...like you said make sure the first drive on the channel (one at the end of the IDE ribbon) set to master and the second (middle of the ribbon) is set to slave. if it still doesn't work then try setting them both to cable select.

is it one of those 100gb drives or is it a really old system? some BIOSes dont' handle large drives well and have to be flashed up.

if that's all cool and still no luck I'd try low level formatting the HD and starting all over again with the reload. the low level will remove the boot sector, all partition information, etc. install will have to recreate your partitions but that's a good thing anyway. if still no luck after that, and the original drive from that system back in there still boots, I'd run some sort of diagnostics on the drive (hw level or scandisk or something) at least before tossing the drive.

What System/MB/HD is it?

 

[wherzwaldo]

Did you actually partition the extra drive or did you format the whole thing?

 

[UT03]

initially i was running 3 hard drives, in xp.

#1 was an 8gb HD but was only 5400 rpm
#2 was an 80 GB 7200 rpm HD
#3 was an 60 GB 7200 rpm HD

Iwindows xp was on #1.

I took it totally out of play and installed #3 as the c: drive with a 10 gb windows partition. And that is when it got stuck. So i unplugged #2 and windows xp setup just fine. So now Im gonna check the jumpers on #2 and try and add it back to the system.

It is a 1.6 GHz AMD. Any other suggestions on how to arrange this system? I use it for video editing just FYI (Premiere).

Thanks so much for the help.

 

[wherzwaldo]

Just curious - why are you partitioning at all? With FAT file systems, smaller partitions were better than larger partitions, but that isn't necessarily the case with NTFS. Plus, that 10GB will disappear faster than you might think.