Need Help installing XP

[orion2]

Can one of you's technical guys here at the forum grant me a wish and help me to install win XP Pro. I am at my wits end with trying to install this.

I just built a PC about 6 months ago and installed win 98 SE, everything works fine, so I thought to myself wouldn't I be the smart bloke on the block who could run two operating systems on the same machine - Duhhh how wrong I was.

I have tried everything. I used partition magic (great app) to make a second partition of 8 GIG and then set about installing XP into that partition. I even made a bootable cd. Everything goes ok up until a point where it says its installing the network components, here it just hangs forever with no sign from the power Led to indicate that it's doing something. LOL it even says its got 33 minutes left to install - after 10 hours of waiting. I've even fdisked and formatted the whole drive again but to no avail and my last resort was to fdisk and format again and do a clean install of XP on its own - still now joy, It always hangs at the installing network.

My system consists of;
Shuttle - space walker AK31 Socket A Mother Board
AMD Athlon XP 1600 +
512 MB DDR
Operating System Win 98 SE
Radeon 8500 DDR Graphics Card
Creative Sound Blaster Platinum 1.5 sound card
40 Gig Maxtor ata 133 7200 Hard Drive


Thanks and all the best

Orion2

[snowmonkey]

Doesn't that suck, waiting 10 hours,, ouch....Anyways, I would suggest you to remove all the cards like Sound Card and Network card and then try to install again. Also invest $20 and get your self a network card (If you have a built in the disable it from BIOS) after installing the operating system with all the patches the add in your cards on at the time and install the driver for it.
By the way, Partition Magic 8.0 in a great software. It does have a module called Boot Magic, you could use that you have a mutiboot of your computer. First Split your drive to what ever size you want (MAKE SURE BOTH DRIVES ARE PRIMARY PARTITION) the you can use the boot menu to boot into which ever you want and even have two operating system which are independent of each other (I sound like PQ sales person .. anyways, please post your results.



cheers

[orion2]

Update -

Ok I finnaly managed to install Win XP, after hours of installing, formatting, deleting partitions, removing pci cards, disabling and asking for help from the pro's.

For some stupid reason unknown to me the answer was in the bios setting. In the "Advanced Chipset Features" I selected the "AGP & P2P Bridge Control" and changed the AGP Mode from 4X to 2X, saved setting and rebooted. XP installed with no probs at all, why the decrease in AGP Mode would affect the installation I have no clue. After it was installed I reset the bios AGP Mode back to 4X - Everything works like a dream now...

Well except that I cant setup an internet connection, when using the interenet connection wizard, I go through all the steps and get set up connection using my own details, I press next and instead of it being "Dial-Up" it's automatically selected "Connect using a BroadBand Connection", the other two selections have been greyed out and are unable to select them.

So now the prob is how do I setup a Dialup connection, my modem is a U.S Robotics 56K Faxmodem external, all drivers have been installed for it and its recognised in the system properties manager.

Any ideas??

Thanks