OK- I have an HP Pavilion 8380 (yeah, it's old). I swapped the BIOS, and it works fine(from Phoenix to an AWARD)- Before the swap, XP pro ran fine, and recognized my full 80G (WD800jb) Now, either something's not set right in BIOS, or something is Physically wrong with the HDD. The PC's been in storage for four years - it's still a fairly new HDD. I have been trying to get it back to where it once was- everything functional and strealined, but XP won't boot after a clean install. I ran NTLDRfixer to see if it wasn't recognizing the MBR and Bootsector during the reboot after setup. To no avail!
XP setup is telling me there is an operating system already on my HDD, even after several refomats (1st tried FAT32-which works with alt. jumper settings at 32G, then tried pulling the jumper and formatting in NTFS- found all 80G) I've tried using WD Data lifeguard and the Dynamic Drive Overlay(which isn't loading when I reboot.) XP setup still says there is another OS. I even went in with a 98 boot disk and ran diskpart.exe to delete the primary DOS partition from my old 98SE OS. Re-ran WD HDD setup disc, and noticed the only way to get the PC to boot to the WD cd, I have to set HDD to NONE in BIOS. Help!!!! I can't get this thing working and I am tempted to throw it in the bay for fish food...
