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I am trying to install a sata 2 drive as my main boot drive however i cannot seem to install windows on it. I have installed the raid drivers during boot and windows starts its install but on its forst reboot it gets to the statup screen and goes to a black screen or just hangs on the statup screen. The original ide drive has windows installed on it but i cannot boot up both at the same time as i was going to copy the contents of my ide across onto the sata drive. Anybody have any ideas, i am stuck.

Thanks

Welcome to PCHF graham251,

Firstly I recommend the following:

• Only connect your SATA + CDROM and install a fresh copy of Windows onto it. (don't have your IDE HDD connected)
• Partition and format the SATA drive.
• Install Windows
• Once installed run all the updates including SP2
• Load an antivirus software
• Then connect your IDE drive and copy the info off.

During installation of windows it will ask to reboot your machine, when it reboots it will still popup with "Press any key to boot from CD", DO NOT touch the keyboard, it will time out and boot from the hard drive.

Did you machine complete the whole of the windows installation?

Hi, thanks for the reply,

for my 1st install i did only have the 1 cdrom connected and the sata drive.
I did partition and format the drive with xp pro
windows then proceeded to install directly after the format. windows then copies over some files and then reboots itself.
it was after this reboot that when the xp loading screen comes it the system just hangs or goes to a black screen. windows had not fully installed...................

This can normally be a couple of things:

• Faulty hard drive - but in this case you have a new SATA drive so we can rule that out.
• Overheating - but it seems to do it in the same place so possibly not an issue but worth checking your fans.
• Faulty RAM - Do you have any spare RAM you could try in your system?

Do you have any additional PCI cards installed or are you using an AGP/PCI video card?

the system is new, new case, new aasus s8n premium mb, new 6800 gs ultra pci-e graphics card, 1gb ddr ram not new and well tested and new case. old ide drive works fine no problems, tried again last night to install windows same problem. i have tried to boot up with the ide drive as primary drive and with the sata as an additional drive so as to copy over the information from 1 drive to another but windows hangs again in the same spot even with the ide set as 1st boot.
Cant understand it. feel like throwing drive out of the window...........