My New System Build

[kcnychief]

No harm in trying #4

 

[Brad]

4 did not work either. Unfortunately, I have to wait until I go to work if I need to do anything with a floppy disk.

 

[Brad]

Thanks for the help, I am going to go to bed now. I will knock at it tomrorw wen I am thinking a little more clearly.

 

[kcnychief]

Do you not have a floppy at home?

You can get one at the store, or pick up a USB floppy drive as long as your BIOS supports that which it should

 

[Brad]

I hooked up my fiance's old desktop that has a floppy drive to HOPEFULLY get what I need. I am about to try and install again.

 

[kcnychief]

If it does, I would slipstream the drivers into your XP CD going forward post install. Either that, or make an image with your imaging program of choice to avoid this headache again

 

[Sazar]

Most new systems don't NEED to have a floppy in order to operate.

When running through the options, if you have a pre-formatted HDD, p-ata, it saves a lot of time.

If not, you can still get things to work, you just have to go through the formatting process.

Depends of course on what you are using.

Sounds like your bios was configured correctly. Now the hdd you are using, is it pre-formatted? Or is it a brand new/never used one?

 

[Brad]

It is brand new. I think I am making progress now. I have gotten further, but now it wont let me create a partition.

 

[Sazar]

Have you tried using a knife?

I hear it makes a good partition

You can typically get started and perhaps get things going with windows. This is why I always try to get a new HDD formatted and partitioned BEFORE putting it into a new system, if I can.

Saves a lot of heart-ache

My current system has 2 p-ata and 1 s-ata drive and the s-ata was sooo easy to get up and running.

 

[Brad]

Unfortunately, I can only do that at work, and even then, it is questionable to do.

 

[kcnychief]

I've never formatted drives before installation, never had problems

 

[Brad]

Well, I am having a problem, and I don't know what is causing it. I am tempted to just return everything and get my money back.

 

[kcnychief]

OK, first off, you won't get all your money back. You will lose on shipping, and more than likely a 15% re-stocking fee.

Hang in there, it will work and when it does it will be worth it

 

[Brad]

All of these other problems keep coming back, such as the problem where it won't start Windows installation, it will just sit there.....like the blue screen won't come up at all.


(This is the one time in Windows that you actually want to see a blue screen)

 

[kcnychief]

Are you trying to create multiple partitions, or just one?

If multiple, as in segmenting your drive off, just make one for now and then use something like Partition Magic to do it later. Make the whole drive the partition in the GUI.

 

[Brad]

I can't even create the partition, whole drive or segmented.

 

[kcnychief]

Might be a problem with the drive itself. Do you have another spare hard drive you can pop in to test? Does it get stuck at a certain percentage each time?

 

[Brad]

It doesn't even try to start it. I have access to other drives, but they are not SATA.

 

[Brad]

Installation is currently running on a regular IDE/ATA drive

 

[Steevo]

I don't know if you have created the actual RAID volume yet but that is needed before you can do anything. On all the systems I have setup you need to press Ctrl+D or some other key-s to access the RAID subsystem. This will also be the same place that you set stripe size and drive size included in the RAID volume.