Problem installing windows..

Crossy

Crossy

Crossy

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Newcastle, The Toon
Hey, I am having a problem while installing windows. I have recently got a computer from my friend which had 2 hard drives 1(60gb) which already had a working operating system but the other was (10gb) and clean so I wanted to format the 60gb hard drive, I used a windows xp pro sp2 cd and it installed on the 10gb hard drive which went well and I tried to format the 60gb from windows and it did not complete so I just deleted as many files as I could from it. I then restarted and booted from the cd and until it reached setup is starting windows then it froze I kept restarting and it would do the same thing or come up with a blue screen saying page_fault_in_non_paged_area caused by ACPI.SYS or something like that, So I done a little bit of research and it said try disabling caches so I done that to both on them on my bios and it worked but was going unbelievably slow it got to the point were the screen comes up with it saying 39 minutes left and I left it on over night but still wasn't done so I restarted and enabled the caches again and it was freezing again I tried just enabling the first cache but still it froze do u have any ideas watt the problem might be ? Thanks .
PS im posting this for a mate of mine...so a reply back may take a bit longer than usual!
 
Go into command prompt, and then type (drive letter goes here): format so for example if it was your d drive you would type "d: format"

EDIT: But I assume you are still booting from the 10Gb HDD (i.e. thats the one that has the operating system on it right, and the other you just want to use for data, etc? If so then you can go into command prompt from windows and format the 60Gb drive like that, but if you are installing windows on the 60Gb then I think you have to press 'f8' at the startup and it will give you a menu....Correct me if i'm wrong dudes.....

Kiz
 
Last edited:
kmistry said:
Aha, so it is then you must have windows installed to use this option....
Click to expand...

Were you thinking of F6 on install for Sata drivers?.......

Old PC, not very likely to be SATA.

Personally i'd say reinstall windows, but delete all the partitions on both drives this time. You can delete partitions on XP install without installing to them.

If last time you installed XP the spare drive had some remenants of an OS on, XP could have written sys files or info to that drive to, hence not letting you format it.

Speculating of course......
 
Crossy said:
what do you mean by that?
Click to expand...

To format a drive in DOS you need a floppy with DOS on, and your floppy drive set as the 1st boot device, so instead of booting to Windows you boot to DOS, and from there you should be able to format the drive, I've had to do that a few times when Windows didn't want to format the drive

Or you could give t31os's suggestion a go as it may be easier if you aren't familiar with DOS.
 
Floppy drive method is proberly faster tbh, google windows boot disk.

Off the top off my head something like bootdisk.com do boot disk for various windows versions.

Don't forget to use NTFS instead of FAT16/32 for XP ;)

Might be helpful if you could list what the hardware is you're using. How many sticks of memory etc.........

ACPI.sys errors are known to appear when there's a hardware fault, not always mind you but it might be worth memtesting the memory if you make no progress, amongst other things.
 
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t31os said:
Floppy drive method is proberly faster tbh, google windows boot disk.

Off the top off my head something like bootdisk.com do boot disk for various windows versions.
Click to expand...

To create a boot disk, just put a floppy in the drive, right click, format, and select the option to create a boot disk :)

Only gives you the version on your PC though.
 
Evil-Penguin said:
To create a boot disk, just put a floppy in the drive, right click, format, and select the option to create a boot disk :)

Only gives you the version on your PC though.
Click to expand...

lol, i know how to make one.....
 
sorry if i explaind it wrong but i dont have an operating system on the 10 gb hard drive either so im basicly stuck. I cant boot into anything and when i boot from disk it gets to the point were it says setup is starting windows then freezes or a error message pops up thanks
 
yea i done that and still no luck i tryed switching them around and just trying one but still freezing thing that confuses me tho is that it wont freeze if i disable both caches (L1andL2) but makes it ultra slow
 
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