My primary harddisk crashed recently and thus I have to install XP pro again on a new drive. But this has proven more difficult than it has ever been before:
I boot from the XP Pro install CD as normal using a NTFS partition. My HDD is a ‘Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9’ 160 Gb but I have set the partition size to 128 Gb (to circumvent the XP SP0 cap).
The program copies the setup files to the newly formatted disk and reboots to start the actual installation process. My problem is that it doesn’t boot but hangs with something like “OS not ready” and I have no idea why. Boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr have all been copied correctly. I have tried both Fixboot and Fixmbr but that didn’t help. I still think it has something to do with the boot record but I have no idea what to try. I have installed XP on this computer before but never with a ‘raw’ HDD so the disk has always been bootable in advance. I hope someone can help me
- KS
My stats:
Cpu: AMD Athlon XP (Barton)
Specification: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+
CPU Clock Speed: 1913.2 MHz
Clock multiplier: x 11.5, Front Side Bus Frequency: 166.4 MHz,
Bus Speed: 332.7 MHz
L1 Data Cache 64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L1 Instruction Cache 64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Cache 512 KBytes, 16-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Speed 1913.2 MHz (Full), L2 Location On Chip, L2 Data Prefetch Logic yes, L2 Bus Width 64 bits
Motherboard manufacturer: Abit
Motherboard model: NF7-S (nVidia-nForce2), 2.X
BIOS vendor: Phoenix Technologies, LTD
BIOS revision: 6.00 PG, BIOS release date: 11/21/2003
Chipset nVidia nForce2 rev. C1, Southbridge nVidia MCP-T rev. A4, Sensor chip Winbond W83627HF
RAM Type DDR-SDRAM (Kingston), RAM Size 512 Mbytes, CAS# Latency 2.0 clocks
RAS# to CAS# 2 clocks, RAS# Precharge 2 clocks, Cycle Time (TRAS) 5 clocks
AGP Status enabled, rev. 2.0 (GF4 TI4200), AGP Data Transfert Rate 4x, AGP Side Band Addressing supported, enabled, AGP Aperture Size 64 MBytes
I boot from the XP Pro install CD as normal using a NTFS partition. My HDD is a ‘Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9’ 160 Gb but I have set the partition size to 128 Gb (to circumvent the XP SP0 cap).
The program copies the setup files to the newly formatted disk and reboots to start the actual installation process. My problem is that it doesn’t boot but hangs with something like “OS not ready” and I have no idea why. Boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr have all been copied correctly. I have tried both Fixboot and Fixmbr but that didn’t help. I still think it has something to do with the boot record but I have no idea what to try. I have installed XP on this computer before but never with a ‘raw’ HDD so the disk has always been bootable in advance. I hope someone can help me
- KS
My stats:
Cpu: AMD Athlon XP (Barton)
Specification: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+
CPU Clock Speed: 1913.2 MHz
Clock multiplier: x 11.5, Front Side Bus Frequency: 166.4 MHz,
Bus Speed: 332.7 MHz
L1 Data Cache 64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L1 Instruction Cache 64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Cache 512 KBytes, 16-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Speed 1913.2 MHz (Full), L2 Location On Chip, L2 Data Prefetch Logic yes, L2 Bus Width 64 bits
Motherboard manufacturer: Abit
Motherboard model: NF7-S (nVidia-nForce2), 2.X
BIOS vendor: Phoenix Technologies, LTD
BIOS revision: 6.00 PG, BIOS release date: 11/21/2003
Chipset nVidia nForce2 rev. C1, Southbridge nVidia MCP-T rev. A4, Sensor chip Winbond W83627HF
RAM Type DDR-SDRAM (Kingston), RAM Size 512 Mbytes, CAS# Latency 2.0 clocks
RAS# to CAS# 2 clocks, RAS# Precharge 2 clocks, Cycle Time (TRAS) 5 clocks
AGP Status enabled, rev. 2.0 (GF4 TI4200), AGP Data Transfert Rate 4x, AGP Side Band Addressing supported, enabled, AGP Aperture Size 64 MBytes
That did it. I feel like such an idiot. I did do a full NTFS format with Partition Magic before I changed the drives but of course the boot record was then on the wrong disk... 