What could be wrong?

[xfactordomine]

I just built a brand new pc for a friend and am trying to install Windows XP Pro on it, but can't get past formatting the HDD. I get Blue Screen STOP 0000000...... blah blah errors.

Here are the specs.

MSI KT3 Ultra2
Athlon XP 2100+
512MB Samsung PC2700
Chaintech GeForce4 Ti4200
WD8000JB
Samsung 52x CD-ROM

Formatting works when I do a QUICK Format.. (this is the first time i've ever done that btw)...

Is a quick format safe? What could be wrong with the pc? Is the hdd a dud maybe?

Help would be appreciated. Thanks.

-X

 

[Freejack2]

Two things to try.

1) Go to www.bootdisk.com and download the win98se boot disk. Fdisk and slow format the drive to fat32.
To do this boot off the floppy, start fdisk and make an active partition on the drive. Unless you want more than one partition on the drive make the partition use 100% of the drive.
When you are done with that, exit and reboot off the floppy, do the usual format c: /s and it'll format a dos bootable hard drive (you'll see a win98 logo real quick)

Go ahead and install Win XP. Hopefully it'll work fine, as an added bonus you'll have a boot menu option to boot into dos. (You can lower the 30 second delay in the system panel in control panel. It's under the advanced tab under startup and recovery settings.

2) I don't know much about this board but it may need drivers for the controller. If you are getting to the format menu and seeing the drive this is highly unlikely to be the problem.

Also make sure S.M.A.R.T is turned on in the motherboard bios drive settings.

 

[Dundain]

I was having a similar error on my laptop right before the HD died and its possible you could be experiencing the same problem. I'd say try swaping an old hard drive into the system and see if it works fine with that.

 

[ChampionAtTufshop]

if the drive is on ata100 controller which requires special drivers it will not work ive found on my a7v
i was lazy to get drivers and such, so i just switched drive to ata66 controller and installed xp, then swtiched it back to ata100 lol

maybe you can do something similar

 

[foofoo]

hi,
in my experience, os install errors can often be a symptom of bad ram. do you have any ram you can swap out? or try using a boot floppy with docmemory.
get it
here for free
good luck

 

[ChampionAtTufshop]

or another one memtest86

 

[buleyb]

Originally posted by: xfactordomine
Is a quick format safe?

Quick format is a partition table change, but it doesn't check the drive like a normal format does. It just scraps the partition tables, redoes them, and moves on. Its fine to do really, when you're done installing, just run chkdsk and see what it has to say. Its not foolproof, but it will do.

I've seen these things occur with bad RAM, faulty P/Ss, and wrong bios settings, to name a few. I would say if it installs with the Quick Format, you can discount these. You are doing NTFS right?

 

[xfactordomine]

Took out one of the 256MB sticks and enabled S.M.A.R.T ... format worked like a charm.

Thanks for all the help guys!

-X