Hard Drive Bootprobs

[YellowOnline]

Hello all,
I was installing WinXP on a Samsung 80GB HD, from the 6 bootdisks combined with the CD. Everything went OK till, after the sort of DOS part, it reboots to continue the installation in Windows. When it rebooted it gave me "Hard diks failure, insert bootable disk" (or something like that) error. I booted in the repairmode and tried fixmbr and fixboot, I doublechecked jumper settings, I disconnected all other devices and still, it won't find my HD (in the BIOS).
If I hook the disk up as a slave, I can access it like any other HD. I filled it up with the data I needed to put on it urgently, so I'm not going to try a reinstall - hoping I will be able to continue the install once.
Is there another possibility left than the the BIOS can't cope with a 80GB HD? (Award 4.51PG, AMD/K6 350 mhz or so)
Or wouldn't it be able to read the HD as a slave than either? TIA for your reactions!

Peace,

Yellow

 

[wolluf]

If it can see whole drive as slave then its ok (does it see whole drive - or perhaps just 32GB?)

Have you got virus protection enabled in the bios? (this prevents XP install writing to the boot sector - causing it to fail) - disable it if this is the case.

 

[YellowOnline]

It sees the whole hard drive in Slave mode, not only 32GB (I didn't put the jumpers on 32GB limit); and BIOS virus is surely disabled (I have never really understood what it's doing there anyway).

Meanwhile I filled the whole HD up without any problems. Still, it would be nice if I could boot from it as a Master...

Peace,

Yellow

 

[wolluf]

'and BIOS virus is surely disabled' - sorry, does this mean it IS disabled - you've checked it?

How did you 'fill the drive with data'? - there's no operating system in your machine.

Have you tried either continuing or restarting the install with the drive connected as slave (it makes no difference to whether XP should install or not if its master or slave).

Also - you say you rebooted in repair mode (recovery console) and tried fixmbr & fixboot - but you can't do that until you've got an installation to repair (this doesn't happen during the initial (dos as you call it) phase of XP install.

So, I think you've left out some of the story - could you fill in the missing details please (if you still need help).

 

[YellowOnline]

Yes it was disabled and about the filling with data: I did that as a slave.

But anyway, I found out it was the BIOS not supporting such a big HD. Now it is in another PC working perfectly.

Thank you for your effort, wolluf!

Peace,

Yellow