[Kashin]

I think i really messed up this time.

I bought this PC like a week ago, and there was nothing wrong with it, except that it ran vista.
I didn't mind vista at first but then i got the wireless 60 second lag-spikes and it really messed up any chance i had at gaming even though everything worked flawlessly with an 'excellent' connection.
So i looked up my options and decided to install XP as a DualBoot.
I have 2 Samsung HD502IJ set up as RAID 0.
So i went and created a new Partition (125GB).
I then ripped my windows CD and slipstreamed the required RAID drivers, since the pc doesn't have a floppy drive.
I booted it up, and it didn't give me the option to boot from CD, so i went to BIOS and set the DVD drive as the primary boot device.
It then recognized it, let me boot from CD, recognized the HD (just 1, 2 partitions), i selected the newly created partition and formatted/installed and everything went fine.

And then i was screwed.

After the install Windows XP wouldn't boot, and neither would Vista.
It'd get to the screen with the loading bar and before 1 bar even passes through, a BSOD flashed and the pc rebooted and repeated the process.
Safe Mode did thesame thing, as did Boot with latest working configurations.

I decided to re-do the installation with no success.

So i looked up many threads on the internet with similar problems, and alot of people reccomended resetting the BIOS to its default settings, since i'm not all that tech savvy i did it. This disabled my RAID 0 setup, and possibly damaged my HDs?

After i did this, as soon as i booted up my PC it'd say Error loading Operating System.
I could still go into BIOS by pressing the required buttons before the screen even turned on.
I tried to fix as much as i could, settings back to RAID, CD/DVD as primary boot device, but as i said earlier, i'm not that tech savvy and playing with the BIOS is whole new territory for me.

After doing this i could get to boot from disc once again (the original windows XP setup works too now, because RAID 0 is off) but:

the C:/ drive reports a size of 800.xx Gigabyte
a seperate D:/ Drive reports the usual 480.xx Gigabyte

Whatever i select, do, or delete, it always says that i'm trying to install on C:/.
And whenever i do it doesn't matter if i select Format or Quick Format i get the following error:

Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged.

Make sure the drive is switched on and properly connected
to your computer. If the disk is a SCSI disk, make sure your SCSI
devices are properly terminated. Consult your computer manual or
SCSI adapter documentation for more information.

You must select a different partition for Windows XP.
To continue, press ENTER.

And that's pretty much where i'm at.. I'm at a complete loss.

So, is there anything left i can do before i have to start saving up to replace parts? I have warranty but i'm not sure i'll be able to get them to replace things when i broke them like this, so i'm hoping there's still something i can do.

PS: I know i didn't list any system specs, since i can't really run Dxdiag right now i don't really know the relevant information but i'm opening up the PC later today and will report back where needed.

 

[raptor_pa]

OK zero wipe both drives with dban or killdisk, sounds like you have some raid info hanging around on the drive. It's no likely that you could have done any damage to the drives - they are just confused by the data on them. If you want to dual boot leave the raid off and use two independent drives. Install XP first - vista uses a new boot loader that XP can't handle if it is already in place so XP must be the first OS loaded. After XP is up and running, initialize, create a partition, and format the second drive as NTFS using XP - this wil insure that XP will be able to see the second drive since Vista also introduced a new Partition table structure that XP doesn't recognize. Install Vista pointing it to the second drive. Vista will recognize the XP install and set up the boot loader so both OS's can use it and will display teh boot menu so you can select the OS to boot.