Windows XP HDD Issues \ VOGONS

Windows XP HDD Issues

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First post, by Swishkebab

Posted on 2023-10-20, 20:27

Swishkebab Offline

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So I've been battling with Windows XP trying to install it onto a hard drive. I tried it with 3 different 1tb drives, one being NOS. They all freeze on the welcome to setup screen where you press enter to format the drives. I picked out some RAM and it did nothing. It once did not freeze and let me start formatting and installing. However, before the graphic stage it said something about a drive error. That to me seems hardware related. It does not freeze when I use my 250gb SSD or 250gb HDD. I am using USB to install windows but it was freezing in the same manner on CD.

The previous drives do not appear to be faulty, but maybe I am missing something as I don't know too much about hard drives. What's the correlation here? The computer itself is DELL XPS 720, if that's relevant.

Reply 1 of 7, by VivienM

Posted on 2023-10-20, 20:51

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Is your motherboard set to AHCI, legacy or RAID?

This seems to be an nForce chipset - have you loaded the F8 floppy driver?

Reply 2 of 7, by Jo22

Posted on 2023-10-20, 21:17

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I remember that old nForce chipsets were SATA compatible, but not AHCI! And barely IDE, either.
They required a special, native driver for Windows XP.
It can either be copied to an 1,44 MB diskette (as F6 driver) or being integrated into a custom CD-ROM image (slipstreamed).

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Reply 3 of 7, by Swishkebab

Posted on 2023-10-20, 22:20

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I slipstreamed the nvidia mediashield driver, was there something else that I missed? What is F6/F8 driver?

It seems this issue is related to my ps/2 port. I changed to another ps/2 keyboard, same issues. I changed to USB, everythinh works. How come the 250gb drives were working with the ps2 keyboards but not 1tb?! The 1tb ones work fine with usb keyboard.

When I first got the computer I plugged the keyboard to the wrong port (misremembered green as being the keyboard port...) Did I mess up my mobo/ps2 ports? Been working fine in w10

Reply 4 of 7, by pentiumspeed

Posted on 2023-10-20, 23:55

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There is short period when it shows "press F6 or F8" to load driver from diskette on startup of XP installation.

Slipstream is easy to make mistakes. For now use the load driver from disk at first to confirm you don't have issues.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 5 of 7, by Horun

Posted on 2023-10-21, 03:22

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Hmmm. never had a problem with my nForce based boards installing XP to a large drive though never set HD for using the full drive for primary.
My main retro work XP box is using a nForce 650SLI board with ST31000333AS <1TB> for boot drive. I use it for running old DOS and windows apps too so use XP 32bit and installed off a SP2 cd to a 31GB Primary for backward compatibilty. And upgraded to SP3...
There are special F6 floppy XP, 64bit and Vista, etc for nForce but they are for when installing in RAID mode iirc, not regular IDE/SATA mode... added: the NV Media Shield driver is for RAID only when BIOS SATA is set to RAID mode.
edit: never mind
So.. which XP are you using ? 32bit or 64bit ? And are you trying to use the full 1TB HD as boot/install ?

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 6 of 7, by Swishkebab

Posted on 2023-10-21, 15:31

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Horun wrote on 2023-10-21, 03:22:
Hmmm. never had a problem with my nForce based boards installing XP to a large drive though never set HD for using the full driv […]
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Hmmm. never had a problem with my nForce based boards installing XP to a large drive though never set HD for using the full drive for primary.
My main retro work XP box is using a nForce 650SLI board with ST31000333AS <1TB> for boot drive. I use it for running old DOS and windows apps too so use XP 32bit and installed off a SP2 cd to a 31GB Primary for backward compatibilty. And upgraded to SP3...
There are special F6 floppy XP, 64bit and Vista, etc for nForce but they are for when installing in RAID mode iirc, not reguglar IDE/SATA mode...
edit: never mind
So.. which XP are you using ? 32bit or 64bit ? And are you trying to use the full 1TB HD as boot/install ?

Well the strange thing is that the 1tbs make keyboard input freeze up if I have my ps/2 keyboard plugged in, otherwise it works fine... Partition size didnt matter.

Reply 7 of 7, by douglar

Posted on 2023-10-21, 15:51

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Here's my basic check list, sorry if some of these are too simple:

Do you have the latest BIOS ?
Does the hard drive work with no bad sectors on another computer?
Are any power cables twisted around the data cables?
Sometimes XP install issues that look like ATA issues are related to bad DMA. Run Memtest+ over night.

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