Odd Reformatting Problem!

Trusty · 17 Jan 2007 at 14:21

Hey guys,

Just tried to reformat my hard drive last night. Works fine until the windows installation bit after the bios reformatting then i get asked to find a file. Think the file is called i324 or something.

This is seriously odd as the xp disc has been working fine until last night!

Sel · 17 Jan 2007 at 14:45

I had something like that a while back, I even got my mates copy of XP and it did the same thing.

In the end I put the drive in another PC and did another format then put the HD back in my PC and it worked.

Now this is where it gets intresting, I then bought a second Hardrive formated it on the same PC(I wanted a sort of dual boot but on seperate drives) and windows installed first time however I messed up installing some drivers so I did yet another format and guess what same error.
This time I just used the otherHD with the working XP to reformat the drive and then tried to install XP and it worked.

Trusty · 17 Jan 2007 at 16:55

Hmm this is odd then. Must be some sort of hardware problem. Ive tried things like changing the ide cables and different slots and stuff. Prehaps i should change the hdd sata cables and in different positions.

cheers

J.B · 17 Jan 2007 at 17:32

I had problems with an xp install on a laptop the other day, had to reseat the ram.

It kept coming up that it was unable to load something into the pre-windows environment

Matt-Page · 17 Jan 2007 at 19:04

Try booting off of a Windows 98 disk and deleting the partition.

Then boot off the XP disk and create your partitions and do a full format. Also, can you try installing from a different CD/DVD drive?

Sel · 17 Jan 2007 at 20:56

When I had the problem myself I did try different CD/DVD drives with the same result.

I did do a couple of reformats a month ago and used the option to reformat from within XP and I didn't have the problem previously I formated from dos using a floppy disc and thats when I had an error.