Windows installation nightmare

DrSteve

DrSteve

DrSteve

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Joined
9 Nov 2004
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592
Location
Northern Ireland
Ok. Hopefully this is in the right forum and hopefully somebody can help.
Just built a new rig for my father which was fairly painless. He's not a vista fan so wants XP on the new machine. I have a copy with sp3 slipstreamed and decided to install that.
Brief spec.. Corsair PSU, Asus P5Q, 4gb Geil, Q6600, Samsung 500gb, Raptor 74 (older 8MB cache drive)
Everything booted perfectly 1st time. Into bios - all the drives showed up, temps good. Tried to install XP - booted from CD, loaded storage drivers from FDD just in case, formatted raptor, copied over installation files, rebooted - nothing!! Wouldn't boot from raptor. Just kept reloading the XP install from the CD (didn't even get the 'press any key to boot from cd'). Tried a couple more time but no luck. I have never come across this problem before.
Just out of interest I tried booting from my Vista DVD - the Raptor didn't show up at all!
Finally tried installing XP onto the Samsung drive - worked without a hitch except that windows ended up on drive F: :confused: The raptor shows up in windows and works perfectly - it even contains the installation files copied over earlier. I just don't get it.
Am I doing some really obviously stupid???
 
There were a few reports of Raptors causing problems in the P5Q thread over at XS, tho most people (myself included) didn't have any issues installing Windows onto them.
 
Suppose I could try it on the non intel SATA controller and see if that makes any difference. It's not like I'm trying to do something I haven't done countless times before. Failing that I might even try reading the manual!!!
Keep the suggestions coming folks. All help much appreciated. :)
 
How about just installing it on the Sammy? Is you dad really going to notice (or appreciate) the small increase in speed that the raptor will bring? You could always bung 2 partitions on the Sammy and install windows on the innermost (1st) if speed is an absolute requirement. With that spec, once Xp itself has booted I would doubt very much if the raptor made more than 5-10% difference in real terms.
 
Don't really have a problem installing on the samsung drive, as you said my dad would probably not notice the difference anyway. I just hate it when things don't work and I like to get to the bottom of it.

Got it to work in the end. Ran the WD tool thingmy from their website - which was a PITA cos it ran from FDD which I had to dig out of the loft and dust off! Can't believe these are still used! Installed 1st time afterwards. All is well. :)
 
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