Formatting

Entai said:
1 take out old hard drive with windows etc on it from your computer case.
2 fit new sata hard drive to computer case using sata data and power cables or possibly a molex to sata power converter, making sure that the bios is set up correctly, and that the bios recognises the new hard drive on the first page when computer boots up.
3 install windows on new sata hard drive
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I get to that point and then when I try to boot into windows I get the error 'Error Loading OS' and there's nothing I can do.

Even if I press F8 or whatever it is to get the boot selection and choose my SATA drive it still gives me the error. :(
 
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i am pretty sure you MUST have sata drivers to enable windows to see the hdd.but of course i could be wrong here :)
tried pressing ,i think it is F5 or is it F6 for additional drivers during install?yes?
 
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ANDARIAL said:
i am pretty sure you MUST have sata drivers to enable windows to see the hdd.but of course i could be wrong here :)
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noyt a single sata drive that is taken care of in the bios itself.

You only need drivers when setting up a raid system to tell the bios to treat the multiple hard drives of a raid array as one single hard disk.

Windows itself just takes it's lead from the bios i believe. Windows does not care wethere the hard drive is sata ide scsci or whatever.
 
Sinque said:
I get to that point and then when I try to boot into windows I get the error 'Error Loading OS' and there's nothing I can do.

Even if I press F8 or whatever it is to get the boot selection and choose my SATA drive it still gives me the error. :(
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So on the first page when the pc boots up just underneath the memory check and the processor there is a list of drives both optical and hard and your new sata is listed there yes??
 
ANDARIAL said:
i am pretty sure you MUST have sata drivers to enable windows to see the hdd.but of course i could be wrong here :)
tried pressing ,i think it is F5 or is it F6 for additional drivers during install?yes?
Click to expand...

Yes but I get asked to put a floppy in with drivers :(

I currently have both HDs in and my SATA drive is just sat there, I am able to put files and music etc on it so it works. I can see it and windows detected it instantly and installed some stuff for it.

Possibly my BIOS is wrong, but surely if I select it in the boot selection and it still says error it can't be :confused:
 
Entai said:
So on the first page when the pc boots up just underneath the memory check and the processor there is a list of drives both optical and hard and your new sata is listed there yes??
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Yes it's there :(
 
Sinque said:
Yes but I get asked to put a floppy in with drivers :(

I currently have both HDs in and my SATA drive is just sat there, I am able to put files and music etc on it so it works. I can see it and windows detected it instantly and installed some stuff for it.

Possibly my BIOS is wrong, but surely if I select it in the boot selection and it still says error it can't be :confused:
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Pressing F6 is when it asks for the raid drivers you do not need these as proved by the fact the drive is working fine and you can put files on it.

The problem is definately in the bios setup, there are two parts to some bios's.

one part where you select wether to boot from cd/hard drive /Lan etc and in which order to boot from
So to install an OS you say boot first from cd/dvd then boot second from hard drive

And another part of the bios where once you have selected to boot from a hard drive in part one you have to tell the bios which hard disk to boot from if you have more than one hard disk in the computer, so here you would say to boot first from the sata drive and boot second from the ide drive.

then the bios will first of all look for a bootable cd /dvd rom in that drive, if it does not find one, it will look on the sata drive for an mbr and boot from there if it finds one, if not it will look on the ide drive and boot from the mbr on that which we know works fine.
 
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Okay i'll try that, here's what exactly is happening though.


ST33206 is the Seagate hard drive

Those are it's setting

This is the boot menu where I select to boot from the SATA drive

And that all I get

I'll go have a hunt about and try what you have said. Cheers. Hope those pic's will clear some things up that I may not have explained clearly enough.

Edit: Just looked through bios and there is nothing to do with which HD to run the OS off, the boot order is already set at CD -> Hd though :confused:
 
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The selection you require (I think) should look something like this

Image2.jpg


1st boot device should be CDROM
2nd boot device should be Hard Disk

Looking at your pictures you posted you only have one hard drive listed there so the choice of which hard drive to boot from would not be given.
 
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Sinque said:
That's exactly how it's setup :(
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This is getting tricky now I can't see anything you are doing wrong, but I maybe missing something myself.

So how far into the instaltion do you get??
 
Entai said:
This is getting tricky now I can't see anything you are doing wrong, but I maybe missing something myself.

So how far into the instaltion do you get??
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It's stressing me out also :D

I format my drive, the windows setup files are copied on the the drive and then Windows reboots after 15seconds. It then restarts and says Error Loading :( :confused:
 
Sinque said:
It's stressing me out also :D

I format my drive, the windows setup files are copied on the the drive and then Windows reboots after 15seconds. It then restarts and says Error Loading :( :confused:
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Really silly question probably, but you have tried more than once yeah??
 
Having done a quick google, it seems other people with the same problem have had a damaged MBR (Master Boot Record).

How it became damaged they did ot know, but to get around the problem meant using DOS command fdisk /mbr.

That seemed the easy bit, the thing that is stumping me is how to get you into a position to use fdisk.

This usually requires the use of a floppy boot disk with the basic DOS commands on it. You would install the floppy boot the computer from it and then from the command prompt run fdisk /mbr. That would clean and repair your MBR and then you could remove the floppy ansd inset the windows cd and carry on the install of the new OS.

As iam sure you have worked out this is a problem for you as you say you don't have a floppy drive.

I think there are ways of making a bootable cd with DOS on it but that is something I have never done.

You could try looking round www.bootdisk.com and see what is there I have heard good things about them
 
Wow that website is giving me a serious head ache, i'll take a look around though. Thanks for all your help, much appreciated.
 
Would the recovery console on the XP disk be sufficient? I tried typing 'fdisk /mbr' but nothing happened.
 
Is it possible to do a fresh install on a drive that already has windows on it?

\Windows, \Program Files\, \Documents and settings can be wiped, but I have other data in other directories ie \Music that needs to be left alone. I know you can quick format but obviously that'll wipe the data, and it has recovery, but I don't want that. The data can be recovered, but it's on DVD-R's, which'll take ages to read in again. I don't have enough space on the other drives just to wipe the drive.

Perhaps using a NTFS boot disc with Xtree like utility, delete the root files, windows, prog files then reboot with install disc?
 
Oh I give the **** up for gods sake, this is just ridiculous. I've got such an insane headache now.
 
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