I need some serious help before i do my head in

[pappaOZ]

hello all

i need your help, here is my problemo......

to cut a long story short i need a new hard disk so i bought one and replaced the old one..... i had been using an illegal copy of xp pro so i thought i would start the new year with good karma and bought a copy of xp home addition from my local software store...... i installed the new hard disk and booted from cd rom to install windows.. So the usual start up happened with setting up of xp home edition.. it got interesting when i got to creating a partion and formatting the hard disk....

After formatting it came with a message to the effect of..... Setup was unable to format the hard disk.. The disk maybe damaged or not connected properly.
so the games begun, i have replaced the hard disk twice and check all my cables and connections and they are ok. the bios can see the hard disk so its all good... Heres the twist.. When i went to install my illegal copy of windows xp pro, the format works and the install was perfect??? What the!!!!!! so my deliema is as such, a clean copy of xp home wont install but my illegal copy of xp pro will, can some one please offer me some advise


thankyou

adam

[snowmonkey]

It seem to me that your hard drive is healthy but your OS CD is messed-up... it is entirely possible that you have a bad copy, remember that Microsoft OS CD's are not pressed in Redmond

Here is a solution I could offer, Get a Windows 98 SE OEM boot disk (YES, Windows 98 SE OEM boot disk) from this site.

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Boot form the disk and destroy the current partition, then make a new partition, format and then make a directory on the hard drive "i386" , now copy all the files from the XP Home CD i386 directory to the hard drive's directory .... and finally start the setup from the hard drive...... when you get to the formatting the hard drive option / select the current setting meaning don't change the partition to NTFS (you can change that later ), see if this would fix the issue, if not I would call Microsoft and let the know that you got a bum CD with bad copy.


Cheers