[Bob Thomas]

Hello, I recently acquired a dell dimension 8300 desktop. There was no hard drive in the machine. I picked up a seagate SATA/300 drive. I installed the drive, attached the power cable and the sata cable to the drive and the motherboard. I then turned the computer on. "Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility" came up on the screen. I entered the setup utility and then Drive Configuration. Under SATA primary drive it showed hard drive. I highlighted the hard drive and it showed the model number and the capacity of 320gb which is correct. I then made sure the settings for the boot order were correct- IDE cdrom first then hdd second.
I placed my windows xp professional cd in the cd drive and tried to reboot.
The drive seems to spin up but won't boot from cd. I then get the previous message of "Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility". Any ideas would be helpful.

 

[manic]

In bios did you setup the sata drive to act as a ide drive not raid?
Did your drive come with a setup bootable cd or a floppy, if so run it
first it may help you. Or you may try this go here...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994 You may need to create
boot floppies, you will need six blank floppy discs....2 out of 5 machines
Ive installed xp on Ive had to use them, and a few win2000 installs as
well.

 

[Bob Thomas]

Thank you so much for your quick response. I believe I have found the problem. The dvd rom drive that I was using to install windows seems to be faulty. I turned it off via the bios settings and used my other drive and
windows seems to be installing. It is only recognizing 136gb instead of 320. The installation disk im using is only sp1. When all is installed and I update to sp2 will it recognize the entire disk. Thanks again for your help

Sincerly
Bob

 

[Bob Thomas]

Based on the previous post. Do I need to reformat the drive? I sure hope not

Bob

 

[Bob Thomas]

Don't know if you missed my question in the last post. If my system only recognizes 137g after install is there anything I can do to access the entire drive? Thanks

 

[manic]

You had it figured out, you need to install sp2 then it should
see the whole drive. On some machines that Ive worked on with
big drives, after sp2 was installed voila, I could see the whole drive.
But on others I had to go into disk management and create a partition
for that space, it kinda sucks I like one fat partition. I may have missed
something on that not sure if its a bios limitation or not, so I just
created a new partition for the extra space.

 

[Bob Thomas]

Thanks for all your help. All my issues are now resolved thanks to the kindness and concern of others.

Bob Thomas