dlforbes

I have a brand new Maxtor 320 gb HD that I have tried to install a new Win XP PRO spftware. It starts up from boot from CD ok, loads the required files, buy at "Microsoft Starting Windows" it freezes up and goes no further. It doesn't even give me the option to format the new drive. Is there something in the Bios that needs to be changed?

ForumKB

How old is the motherboard? If it's quite old you may need to update the BIOS to properly support drives over 137GB.

If it a legit copy of XP?

dlforbes

The WindowsXP is a brand new retail ver. The motherboard is a Gigabyte and I had windows running on it before my old hard drive crapped out and it was a 200 GB maxtor.

dai

is it ide or sata

dlforbes

it is a pata drive.

dai

check you are usuing a 80 wire ide cable on the drive
check the jumpers are set correctly on the drive
master on the end of the cable
slave on the middle plug

dlforbes

It is a 80 wire ide cable, it is pluged in at the master end of cable and jumper is set at cable select. I go into the bios make sure HD is detected as primary-0, it is showing everything correct and I boot order set as FLOPPY,CD ROM, HD-0. I selected "Load Fail-Safe defaults" and save. My CD drive is listed as "IDE Secondary Master"

I reboot and I have the new Windows XP CD in the in the drive, when booting it indicates to boot to CD and I press a key to boot from CD. Windows Setup starts up, goes through loading the files then it hangs up at "Setup is starting Windows" and goes no further. I have even chenged to a different HD and the same thing happens.

texas666

Any chance that moving the CD to another ide port? I've had issues of lockups in the past having a CD and HD on same port.

dukemtl

The hanging up happened before or after the following step during XP install: "Select a partition for the install? Press C to create, press D to delete etc..." ?

dlforbes

The CD is on IDE port 2, not even on the same cable

It hangs up before it even gets into the partion option.

Last night I tried three different HD's that I had used as external USB connected storage drives and none of them work as far as getting windows to install. Is there anything in the bios or cmos that I need to change or load? Each time I tried a different HD I went into bios during bootup to make sure the drive was recognized and loaded the optimize defaults, saved and continued to load windows. Every time it stops at "Setup is Starting Windows"

Varant

Change the jumper from cable select to master since it is the only drive connected to that IDE port. That might resolve the issue as I had the same problem once!

dai

don't use cable select always use m/slave

dukemtl

During initial phase of XP clean install, Windows loads set up files in computer RAM and run them from there to inspect your hardwares etc... Since hang up problem occurs during this phase, either installation CD is bad, some set up files can not be loaded , or RAM is faulty. Also your new hard drive might not compatible with XP Pro SP2 but i doubt it

Can you borrow a copy of Windows 2000 or XP without SP2 and see what will happen.

Since your new hard drive is quite big, i would create 2 partitions (ex: primary = 120 Gb and logical = 200Gb) before installing Windows OS.

dlforbes

Will give this a try tonight, thanks.

dlforbes

I made sure the HD jumper was on master setting as well as on the CD-RW drive and the DVD drive, I even pulled the cables off all the other drives that were not needed for the install. The master HD & CD-RW drives devices on thier own 80 wire cable, I have 2 GB of ram which checks out OK at boot up but I pulled out 1 GB and all the PCI cards that did not need to be in yet. I booted up with a good known windows install cd and Hallelujah it's working, so far, it's still formating the drive but it's going farther then it has been. My thanks to all of you for your input.

dlforbes

Everything is going great. Just finishing up on all the Windows updates. Again thanks.

dukemtl

I'm glad you are able to get rid of the headache. Now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy your new and clean system :-). Congrats!!!

dlforbes

Well as luck would have it, now I have another problem. After downloading all the windows updates including Internet Explorer 7 I can not access the internet. I click on the icon to open up IE7, I get a blank window for a nano second, then nothing. I've tried going to all the places where I can click on IE7 but the same thing happens. Is there something in Internet Options that needs to be activated?

dlforbes

One thing I noticed is when I went to remove IE7 it also wanted to remove all the other updates that was downloaded along with IE7, so I cancelled the removal and look for a better solution.

dai

you can turn it off in add and remove