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

Allattar · 3 Feb 2007 at 13:12

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?

Allattar · 3 Feb 2007 at 13:44

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 · 3 Feb 2007 at 14:36

and its got worse

vista has decided it cannot install to this hard drive now. It was able to before. :mad:

Allattar · 5 Feb 2007 at 08:40

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.