I've got my computer up and running, but I'm having trouble getting it to install and run XP. It's been a bumpy road, but now I'm at a road block and I can't find any answers by googling. First I tried many times to install XP and it works well through formatting the hard drive and copying the setup files. It gets to the point where it needs to reboot to continue to the GUI setup. At that point, I let the hard drive boot (bypass CD drive) and then the screen goes completely blank. There is no response and I can't Ctrl-Alt-Del restart. I've tried deleting the partition and formatting FAT and NTFS. I've tried different partitions and tried without partitions. I hooked up a working hard drive from my other computer that already had Windows installed and it worked well and I was able to install all of the hardware so I know that the computer itself is working fine. I hooked up the hard drive that wouldn't install windows on to my old computer and I was able to install with no problems. When I put the drive with a fresh version of Windows into the new computer it still just goes blank at bootup. The Windows XP CD that I'm using is a student version that we've had for a few years now that I would use to restore an older computer. Is it possible that the new computer is not recognizing the student version as a valid Windows Install CD? Any help is greatly appreciated.
I'm guessing you're using an old version of XP. I've seen this problem with people who try to install on hard drives larger than 120GB with old media. Your best solution is to get an SP2 copy of XP. The second solution is a smaller drive. You could try partitioning, or installing on an old drive and then ghosting to the new drive after you patch the machine to SP2.
Actually this is an old 13 GB drive that I'm trying to install on. My new 160 GB is SATA and I couldn't get it to work on that first so I have been using the old drive that I am more familiar with and that I know has had XP installed before. I'll trying installing SP2 and see if that helps.
you need a floopy disk and copy the required SATA drivers to it and press F6 button on the start to install the SATA driver or you can streamline the SATA drivers into a WinXP CD with nlite.... Also reseting your bio to default value may also help.....
I installed the sp2 and now I've got it working on this drive. I'm going to start working to get the SATA drive working now.
Do you have a second video card installed by chance? I had a situation where I would install XP and it would get so far and then the screen was just blank. It turns out that XP decided to start using the other video card so everything was fine; it was just displaying on the other card (which was not hooked up to a monitor).
