Help, can't reformat and reinstall XP...?

R

RuchG

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 1, 2003
Messages
118
Ok so I decided to reformat my computer, it currently has XP running on it but its running slower than it should. So I am trying to reformat, however, when I insert the CD and boot from it to completely reformat and start over, it tells me that there is no harddisk detected... Clearly there is a harddisk, i'm on it right now. My harddrive is a Seagate 120gb SATA drive.
 
make sure your bios recognises the sata drive..have you change anything since you last installed...
 
you may need a floppy with the sata drivers on it if you cant get it detected by the bios
but there should be an option somewhere in there to scan the sata bus for hdds
 
Hey guys, the bios does recognize the hdd, and shows it at start up. I mean afterall I am on the computer typing this.

I'm going to try what cloaked said although I don't have much faith lol. Heres hoping...
 
Oooook, screwed up royally now:(:(:( I am now on my old computer cause the new one won't start. I tried the whole pressing F6 thing to load the SATA driver from the A: and that got me to the screen where it shows my harddrive size and whether i want to delete a partition, install windows, etc. Welll, I pressed enter to install windows and then it said it already detected windows and gave me the option of installing windows in a new folder, reinstalling in the same folder, or quiting, so I reinstalled. It didn't ever give me an option of reformating and just copied a bunch of files then restarted. Now my computer won't start:( It still POSTs and recognizes there is a harddrive, but won't load windows. So how do I completely format this thing? Cause windows won't let me. I have no clue whats going on...
 
Boot from the CD and start from there again or boot from the same floppy that you put in and this time make sure you DELETE the partition. THat's the first step to a completely new reformat. After you delete the partition make sure that the reinstalled windows is gone to after that, install XP.

Make sense?
 
You can always throw the SATA in to someone else's PC and do it.
It's crude but it's effective.
 
You just didn't read the whole screen. At the bottom it should have said press C to continue, you don't need to delete the partition if you don't want to, it won't hurt it but its not really needed, windows will create a new one if you don't specify sizes.

Just make sure you read the whole screens, all the options for reinstall are all there.
 
Ahh ok thanks a lot, I'll try that as soon as I get back from class today. Hopefully I'll get this beast up and running for sure.
 
Ok I deleted the partition and reformated and all that. So that all worked. Now a new problem arised, when XP tried to install, it said it could not copy UlSata.sys or something, i thought it was going to be in the driver disk. But it couldn't copy it. Then I just skipped it, and it couldn't copy some other files. I skipped them all, then after all that it copied a bunch of files then just restarted, and I'm back to square one. So whats next lol?
 
so far you are describing almost exactly what I am going through, except I am trying to install onto a WD 5200rpm 13gig ata.

I had a hard time getting it to format, and I get the same can't copy file problem, and I got the 'no harddrive detected'.

NOW I have it copying files but it is going REALLY SLOWLY, like a minute per 13kb dll.

so far it gets to in the low teens% completed and starts to fail to copy files and makes me start over.

heh, it just this moment failed to copy wmploc.dll @ 9% completed.

I pushed enter for retry and it WORKED !!:eek:

{it's just jumped up to 10% :D }


I don't think it is the sata drive that is the problem.
 
Dont you have to hit F6 and install drivers for SATA, kinda like a raid setup?

I could of sworn that was the way you needed to do it, but could be wrong....just thought it was worth a shot.
 
As for my problem, I found the solution. If you are installing on an SATA drive, and you want the windows xp installer to recognize the sata drivers off of the floppy disk, you need to start the XP installer off the XP Floppy Boot which takes 6 floppy disks.
 
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