Hey All,

Where to start?

I put together my own computer for the first time with relative ease, but my inexperince came to a head when it came to installing XP...

I decided to use my new hard drive (250 GB Maxtor STM3250310AS DiamondMax 21, SATA II, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache, 11 ms) for the XP install and use my old hard drive (80GB IDE, not sure what make) as a back up. The install of XP went fine and I managed to install all the drivers that came with the motherboard and all the Windows Updates without and problems.

However, when I was putting together the PC I never formatted my IDE hard drive before fitting it into my machine so every time I booted windows it asked me which XP I wanted to boot and it was taking quite a long time for the Windows XPloading screen to pass. I then went into my newly installed XP setup (the one installed on my SATA hdd) and proceeded to format the IDE hard drive via the 'Disk Management' utiliity.

Once the IDE drive had been formatted (by NTFS) I then rebooted my machine, except it didnt boot. I went into the bios and specified my SATA as the primary boot drive, but still it wouldnt boot and asked for the system disk every time (which did nothing even when selecting 'repair OS'). I tried everything in the bios that seemed obvious and also tried disconnecting the IDE drive to force it to boot from the SATA, but still to no avail.

After about an hour of trying different things I decided to just do another clean install. I installed XP as before, but even though the IDE drive was disconnected it was still asking me to select which XP install.

And in addition whenever I go into this new XP install, after installing the drivers and Windows Updates for a second time, it is showing my SATA drive and my DVD drive as removable media in the system tray which is a bit off putting in the sense that it shouldn't and wasnt there before.

So my question is - how can I install XP again from scratch so that it discounts all previous installs?

My Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 and am running an AMD 6400+ cpu.

Apologies for the extensive post, your help is very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Sk

Sorry, forgot to mention that it is XP Proffesional

the boot sector was written to the drive you formatted. Boot from the xp cd and enter recovery console when offered. at the A:/ type fixboot hit enter and reboot if that fails try fixmbr hit enter reboot if that fails try bootcfg /rebuild and run that. If that fails its a repair install or reformat and start again

Thanks for the reply,

I'll give that a go and let you know how I get on.

Sk

Hi,

I tried to repair the install, but none of them worked so I just done a clean install which seemed to do the trick. Thanks

Shaun