XP wont load!

[sealwatcher]

So, as the subject title would suggest I'm having trouble getting XP to load. Here's some background:

After having trouble partitioning a new Western Digital Raptor drive from scratch, I gave up and fresh installed windows on a 40gb IBM deskstar. Using this as my C drive I connected the Raptor and partitioned and formatted it with partition magic (with 1 primary partition and in NTFS format.) This appears to have worked.

I now have 2 drives; my IBM as C: and the Western Digital as F:.

For some reason I can't get XP to boot from CD, so I fresh installed a new copy of XP through windows, and simply selected to install it on F: Everything installed without a problem.

However, when it went to do the final restart and load...nothing happened, and it still refuses to load. There is definitely an operating system on F: When I start my computer I am given the option of which install of XP I want to load, just as if it was a dual boot. The original on drive C still loads fine, and I can see that all the windows files are there on F: but if I try to start it, all I get is black screen. It wont even show the windows logo. This also happens if I disconnect the IBM and try to boot the Raptor solo. Just black screen.

Could this be a bios issue? Perhaps I screwed up the partition or format, but as I said it appears that windows has installed fine so there should be no reason why it wouldn’t load. I've tried re-installing it time and time again with different combinations (FAT32, NTFS) all with the same result.

Here are the specs:
Pentium 2.8
Abit IC7-Max 3 mobo
2gig, kingston ram
40gb, IBM deskstar (C) -on IDE
74gb, WD Raptor (F) -on SATA

any help would be fantastic.

[sealwatcher]

Just a thought...when asked to install "third party SCSI or RAID drivers" during setup, I didn't as I thought this was unnecessary. Do I need to install one of these drivers for the computer to boot the SATA disk? (I have the floppy driver supplied by the mobo manufacturer.)

Also would the difference in drive letters have an effect?

I'm just stabbing in the dark here.

[krusher]

I read something about this on the Abit forums as I have an Abit board.
You need to have the raid bios enabled; the driver can be installed after windows installation if you're not setting up an array.

[sealwatcher]

Well, I finally got it to work.

Since my computer doesn't seem to want to boot from the CD drive (even though I've set it in the BOIS) I was using a floppy boot utility -that just didn't cut it. That¡¦s mostly all it was.

I also had to fiddle around in the BOIS and change settings under "Integrated Peripherals". My IDE Function setup was set to AUTO, and it didn¡¦t seem to be detecting my SATA drive...only my IDE ones...hence the trouble booting. So I had to change the SATA section to "EXPERT MODE" so that it would run both my IDE drives and the SATA together...I assume (I really just guessed at all that.)

So, as I said this seems to have worked but I just want to check that I didn't purely fluke it. Does it sound like I've used the correct settings for my hardware? My boot disk is running on the SATA connector and I have two backup drives running on the old IDE. I suppose it would be nice for my computer to have automatically detected this, but is EXPERT MODE the right one to be using?

[krusher]

Looks like you're on the right track...
Your SATA drives are actually on the raid controller. That's why raid needed to be enabled and why they're not detected by the IDE AUTO setup.

To boot from the cd, put it on the primary controller. You shouldn't have to, but sometimes that's the only way.

[sealwatcher]

Thanks for the reply mate, I appreciate it.

[pip22]

Excuse me if I'm stating the obvious, but did you remember to 'press any key' when prompted during the boot process, to force the system to boot from the xp cd? This is necessary even with the bios boot-sequence set correctly

[sealwatcher]

Yeah, I did, but it just kept reading the CD and not booting. It's okay, I'm past that now anyway. Things seem to be fine.

"Press the any key. Where's the any key? Hmm. I think I'll have some Tab instead." -Homer Simpson.

I love that.