Help please... before i gop mad, installing win xp

Allattar

Allattar

Allattar

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7 Apr 2004
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199
Ok I decided i need to dual boot vista and xp.
So time to start from fresh
I put the win xp CD in and boot, yet when it tries to install it claims the drives are not compatible with win xp (home).

its a bfg 680i motherboard WDcaviar hard drive, i didnt think it needed sata drivers on a floppy to install xp, but it doesnt install. So perhaps i do. If I do need sata drivers where can i find them. I cant find them anywhere.

Vista installed fine, however this is being really awkward.

Any ideas?
 
ahhhhhhh

this is driving me crazy using what i am assuming iare sata drivers from the BFG 680i cd and it still says after i create a partition that it is not xp compatible.

I want to format the ******* drive and the only choices I have are install or create partition.

All this to dual boot dear lord someone help.
 
Allattar said:
Ok I decided i need to dual boot vista and xp.
So time to start from fresh
I put the win xp CD in and boot, yet when it tries to install it claims the drives are not compatible with win xp (home).

its a bfg 680i motherboard WDcaviar hard drive, i didnt think it needed sata drivers on a floppy to install xp, but it doesnt install. So perhaps i do. If I do need sata drivers where can i find them. I cant find them anywhere.

Vista installed fine, however this is being really awkward.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

generaly when you dual boot, corect me if im wrong, you should have installed xp first then installed vista ??
and as for the drives not compatible problem, i suspect that is a bios problem, ie have you rescently updated it ?, or altered it in some way look through your bios, ie raid options ect.

also if you was starting a fresh, i would have deleted the partion, installed xp, formattted it via xp, then i woudl of used a partion manager program, to create another partion for vista, it should then install fine, and if you then descide to jsut use one, its a lot easier to delete one or other.

hope it helps
 
Last edited:
yea i believe its xp first then vista aswell ^^
sounds to me like your running on the raid controller as JBOD(i.e. single drive) and it needs the raid driver to let the setup (windows xp or vista) show the harddrive partition.
 
Ok it works.
To answer everyone above.
It is XP SP 2.
I had deleted the previous Vista install, so it is a fresh install of XP and then Vista.

Of course what I had forgotten I had done was I had swapped the boot priorities around and had the second HD, a WD Raptor set to dynamic as my primary boot disk. Of course nothing will install to a dynamic disk, but I have a lot of data on it. I wasnt worried about installing it to this drive anyway, but interesting to know neither Vista nor XP will install to a dynamic drive.

What I didnt realise is that you cannot install windows to an HD that is not the primary boot hard drive. So the WD caviar drive (not set to dynamic) could not be installed on to becuase it was set as the second boot HD. Despite the fact I had been booting vista from it for a few days whilst it was set to second in the boot order.

I found this out after I bought a cheap hard drive just in case the caviar had been knackered. I plugged the new drive in and went into bios and as I went to set it to the primary boot drive I noticed the mistake.

So its fixed now. Lesson learnt dont play around with boot priorities, and then not put the settings back.
 
drunkenmonkey said:
it must be a pre sp2 copy of xp,with sp2 you dont need to manually install the sata drivers it does it automatically
Click to expand...

actualy you are incorect on that, it all depends on the actual sata chipset/drivers, i had to use a floppy with both my amd abit nfs v2 mobo, and my intel asus mobo, the only time you realy do not need drivers is you are using a oem xp (that came with the motherboard, ie large big brand ready built systems)or a self made slipstreamed xp.
 
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