pianoman1949

You folks are gonna love this. I am trying to understand the cause of a problem I am having; I appreciate your time and patience:

Executive summary:

After I installed Windows XP on my hard disk's primary partition (freshly formatted), I am unable to install Windows 2000 (booting from the Windows CD) anywhere. Windows setup cannot see my hard disks via a disk controller card. Most perplexing, I can't find any way to undo this problem. And yes, I know about and use F6 to install the drivers for the disk controller card. It just doesn't have the desired effect anymore.


More detail:

My computer has an unusual setup (created by the store I bought it from), but has been working fine for years. It has two hard drives that both run off a Promise Technology PCI disk controller card, and the two motherboard IDE ports are connected to two CD burners.

My primary hard drive had 4 partitions, with Windows 2000 on the first three partitions and Windows XP on the fourth, using Microsoft multibooting. All instances of both operating systems have been working fine. I have successfully cleared off (re-formatted) partitions many times and installed Windows (both 2000 and XP), and never had a problem.

But recently I did something I apparently have never done before: cleared off the first (primary) partition (which used to have 2000) and installed Windows XP on it; trying to keep up with the times, I guess.

Big mistake. After doing that, I became unable to boot up any of the remaining 2000 os's (the XPs were fine). I got a message complaining about "can't find hal.dll". What I have read about this problem sounds like 2000 and XP have different needs for some system files in that primary partition, and they are incompatible.

So I need to go back to the way things were, because I need to be able to use both operating systems. But when I tried to do that (re-format the primary partition and install 2000), I found that now I am unable to do any Windows 2000 installs at all. "Windows setup cannot detect any hard drives on your system".

Further experimenting has only left me more confused: I zeroed out the hard drive; I put in a different hard drive. It seems that when XP was installed in the primary partition, it modified or detroyed *something* *somewhere* on that hard drive that makes 2000 setup unable to see the hard drive via the controller card. But where? I have run out of places to look! If I put in another drive, the problem goes away. If I subsequently install XP onto the primary partition of that different hard drive, it acquires this mysterious problem too.

So to re-state my experience:

Windows 2000 setup does not see the hard drives plugged into my Promise Ultra 100 TX2 PCI disk controller card (even though F6 during setup appears to load the controller card drivers properly) IF the primary partition on the primary hard drive has, or has had sometime in the past, XP installed on it.

If the drive has never had XP in the primary partition, Windows 2000 setup works fine. If it has had XP in the primary partition, I get the error, even if that primary partition has been re-formatted .... even if the entire disk has been zeroed!

I am not looking for a way to side-step the problem; I have already done that by temporarily plugging the hard drive into the motherboard IDE socket long enough to do the Windows 2000 install. But that doesn't explain specifically what's causing the problem, and therefore how to fix it. It doesn't say why what's been working fine for years suddenly quit working.

Honest, I am not doing anything differently. The only difference is that Windows XP seems to have pooped on the hard drive somehow. I probably need a source code guru, someone who knows the details of XP and its install process, to tell me: What did XP do that I can't seem to undo, even by zeroing the whole disk out?

Thank you kindly,
Ted