be4con

So, I will need to do a clean install of XP, there is no way to make the drive active without doing that?

At the moment the right click option to mark the partition as active is grayed out. There are no active partitions at all listed on my system and apparently no way to make any of them active from the context menus.

dai

then it looks like a reinstall in vista it gives the option i haven't used xp for about 3 yrs i seem to remember it took a reinstall in xp

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be4con

OK, I'll reinstall XP. Thanks. Is it worth formatting first or will I be OK just doing a fresh install over the top?

dai

format and do a clean install

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be4con

Thanks again dai. I've had another idea though. When my SATA dvd drive arrives on Friday I will be able to install my empty spare IDE HDD. I am now thinking of installing XP on this empty drive, that way I can make sure I have all the settings and data transferred across before finally formatting my current SATA HDD. Belt and braces as it were :)

Is there anything I will need to do to force XP to install on this 2nd IDE drive rather than on the current C drive when I do the installation? Do I need to change the drive letters around for example, or will I be given the choice of which drive to install it on when I boot from the XP installation disk?

mattlock

You should be able to choose the hard drive you want, but the safest way to do it is simply unplug the power or SATA cable from your current hard drive then install XP to the other drive. Once it has installed reconnect your SATA drive.

BTW, if you have a floppy drive you can try using Fdisk from a Windows startup disk to set the partition as active again. It just might solve your problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315261

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305595/

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Matt

be4con

Yeah, I did wonder about Fdisk, it's come up a few times on searches, but no floppy drive unfortunately.

I have also read comments about using a LINUX based OS on CD to do the same thing, but no real explanation of what or how to do this. Any ideas?

be4con

I wasn't sure whether to post a whole new thread here or just keep going on this one. Let me know if I should move this now. I appreciate that the problem is now HDD and XP related rather than PSU and RAM

I fitted my empty hard drive today, fitted the new fans and heat sink and new SATA DVD drive. Everything boots up and the pc is whisper quiet which is great. Thanks for all your help solving that problem.

I then went through the process of installing XP on the spare empty HDD and everything seemingly went fine. That is, until I removed the XP CD and restarted the pc only to get the same disk boot failure message I had when I was trying to boot from the other HDD (which is currently physically disconnected)

So I replaced the XP CD and booted the system and went to disk management and discovered that the newly created C drive is not listed as active, and what's more the option to make it active is grayed out as it was on the other HDD.

So I now have 2 HDD both with a system partition with XP installed and on neither HDD can I make that partition active.

What I have been able to do is create a 2nd primary partition (F:) on the HDD and make that active. I am then given the option at least to make the C drive active on the right click menu, but when I did this the F partition stopped being active but the C partition was still not listed as active.

I'm totally flumoxed. Any suggestions as to what is happening here? Why would this happen on a clean install of XP on a formatted HDD? How can I solve the problem?

Thanks as ever.

dai

log on as admin and check if you can then make the partition active in disk management
i have not had this problem as i am reguarly installing op systems and i have a number of drives for this purpose and always have a vacant one which i have formated and made active in disk management prior to installing

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be4con

Thanks again dai.

I think I've finally managed to solve the problem. I had to tweak some settings in my BIOS relating to hard disk boot order and change the jumper settings on the 2nd drive to slave (which seemed counter-intuitive to me - the master IDE device is a dvd drive) but now both the new IDE drive and the the old SATA drive have an active partition on them and I have been able to boot to XP on either drive (depending on what combination are physically connected to the system)

I've proceeded with the fresh XP installation and the original problem now appears to be solved.

Thanks very much for all you patient assistance on solving this for me.

Dave :)

dai

glad you have it sorted

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