XP SP2 Install Problems... Help!!!

F

Fury

New Member
Hi Everybody

Here's the deal: I decided to format my C: drive, and give it a fresh and new XP install (I also have two more partitions. D: at the same HD as the C:, and E: on another HD). So, I got my Windows XP SP2 CD, and stuck it in the drive and rebooted. The first thing that turned out abnormal was the boot. Normally when you put in an XP CD, it asks whether or not you would like to boot from the cd. It didn't this time, it just went straight into the installation of XP. Anyway, when I came to the screen where you need to decide which disk drive you want to install XP on, my drives had changed letters. My C: had become D:, the drive normally named E: had become D:, and the D: had become E:. This surprised me, but I tried installing XP anyway (On the disk that used to be C:, but was now adressed to as D:)
Then, when it had formatted the disk (I deleted the D: partition and made a new one, to make sure that it formatted it) then it had to reboot, like usual. But then, the problem returns. It doesn't ask whether I want to boot from cd or not, so it just does. And then, you see, it makes a loop: Booting from cd, formatting disk, copying files to drive, rebooting, and then starts over. To prevent this I tried forcing it to boot from Hard Drive, but then a black screen appears, where it says there is a problem with my OS installation, and that I should put in a boot device, or whatever... Like there was no OS at all...
This is very frustrating since I need my computer. Any ideas?

Oh, by the way, I tried using another XP CD, but didn't change nothing. Also searched the BIOS for some setting that might prevent it from booting from cd without asking. No results.

A scream for help...
~Simon
 
I don't have a boot disk at the moment, and creating one eg. on my fathers computer won't make any difference, cause format.exe is never copied to boot disks. Tried manually to download format.exe so that I could just boot MS-DOS with a boot disk, and then use format.exe from another disk, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Really don't know what to do here...
 
I'm considering plugging my two Harddisks to my fathers computer, then backing up the most important of my stuff, and then formatting everything. Then hope it works... What do you think about that?
 
Solution!!!

Got the solution:

I went to my fathers computer to start backing up my things, but when I had connected my ATA HDD to his computer, it wouldn't boot. So, I figured there might be a problem with the Harddisk. So, I tried connecting the one of my HDD's to my computer, and then once more installing XP. And it worked. The ATA HDD was both causing the problem that it wasn't asking whether to boot from XP CD or not, and it was also causing the XP installation to be corrupt.
So, I unconnected the ATA HDD and installed XP. Took out the XP CD, to prevent the ATA HDD from forcing it to boot from the XP CD. Connected my ATA HDD once more, and booted Windows. Now everything's fine, once again. A bit strange solution though!
 
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