XP Install Problems (Inaccessable Boot Device)

[Niroth]

Hi,

I'm trying to setup a computer for my grandfather using my old computer (an athlon 1500+ 256meg ram machine). I'm using the hardrives from his old windows 98 box which are each 6 GB. I am able to start the windows setup from cdrom but everytime it gets to "Setup is Starting Windows" it ends up halting with a stop error. I looked up the error code and it is the one for "Inaccessible Boot Device". It does this with both of the hard drives. I know both of the hard drives were good yesterday and i highly doubt both would have failed today. I ran ran fdisk on one and removed all partitions then created 1 primary dos partition and formatted it. still getting the same error. Would there be a bios setting that is causing this? Any other idea?

Thanks a lot

PS: I've tried XP Pro and Home editions so it's not a scratched cd or anything.

[Miz]

Did you use the XP CD to do the re-partitioning and formatting? If not, try that and see if things works a little better.

Keep in mind that 99% of install problems with XP are about RAM. XP is extremely fussy about RAM and if it thinks there's anything at all wrong with the RAM modules, bad things will follow.

[Niroth]

I tried doing it both with the partition setup ahead of time using fdisk as well as having fdisk remove all the partitions and create no new ones. the windows xp setup never gets to the part where it would create/format, it crashes right after loading all of the drivers. I will Try re-inserting the RAM but it should be good as the hard drive in the machine previously was running xp.