Installing WinXP on a large hard drive?

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DarkHound

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 22, 2002
Messages
81
Ok I've been wracking my brain on this for 3 days now. I'm at the end of my rope. I built a new system with 2x 250 gig sata hard drives. I go to install windows and everything is fine until it reboots the last time. The system locks with a black screen.

Ok fine, I restart and go into safe mode... System locks at MUP.SYS.
grrr.. Ok so I decide there must be something wroing with hardware. I pull out my UBCD and run tests on the hard drives, memory and a burnin test for the processor.. Nothing

On a whim I tossed a 20 gig ide hard drive in and tried to install again. Amazingly it worked!

So thinking there is something wrong with the sata controller, I replaced the motherboard. Nope, still not working on the 250 gig..

I try a 160 gig ide drive.. nope same problem

I try a 60 gig ide drive.. it works again!

I'm trying hard to figure out a way to get windows installed on one of these sata drives.. Anyone with an idea here?
 
Could be SATA controller problem. Check mobo web site, see if you can find answers. I had a Gigabyte board do something similar to me, nad to upgrade to a new BIOS. Had another board do same thing to me, was a memory problem. You said you already did memory testing, so sounds like that is not the issue.
Please post detals on what mobo you got, and what SATA controller it is using and what type of SATA setup your trying to do. The more details, the better answer you will get. Need names of the things your having trouble with to give best answer.
 
I've tried 2 different mobos an EVGA board that came with my video card and an MSI K8N SLI -F. Same problem with both boards. I've even updated to the latest bios on my MSI board. The hard drive is a WD 250 Gig 16mb cache drive.. I've got 2 of them and both work as expected when I'm in windows on another drive.

As I said before, windows installs all the way and gets to the last reboot before it decides it's going to lock for the first time. If I boot into safe mode it stops at MUP.SYS

It just doesn't want to install on a large hard drive..
 
Have you tried partitioning the drive off to say, a 20gb and a 230gb and installing windows on the small partition. That would likley refine your issue down to a more specific problem.
 
Are you also using an XP disc with SP2 slipstreamed in already? If not, you should be.
 
Well I finally got it installed... I didn't like the method I had to use, but it works and I'm done screwing with it for now. I booted off my old hard drive and used disk manager to partition the 250 gig drive off to 60 gigs. I then installed windows with no problems on this drive...

What I still don't understand is why it will work at 60 gigs, but not at 120 or 250.. It does indeed have service pack 2 included, I'm not sure what more I could have done.. Oh well, thanks for trying to help guys.

Cest la vie..
 
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