I am attemtping to reinstall windows XP on my computer (which has just had a new motherboard, ram and video card installed so is totally up to date - Asus board with intell pentium 4 3.2 Ghz and 1Gb of some fancy ram). XP was installed by the company who updated it but in the last week have had some disasters installing software which resulted in a dogs breakfast and ti beign unstable so want to start again.

When I insert the windows XP cd and reboot, I press any key to reboot from cd, everything goes swimmingly until it comes time to choose the partition to install windows in. It only shows my second hard drive the 'd' drive as being available to install XP on. If I physically unplug the second drive and try it it says there are no drives to install it on???

I am sure there is something obvious that I am missing here and woudl love some help. I have never installed an operating system before but would like to be able to do it myself so I can do it at regualar intervals to maintain the health of my system...

regards

steve

While inside windows, click "Start", click "Run", and type "diskmgmt.msc". This will open the Disk Management Program. This program will show you information about your physical and logical drives.

Do you see a C: drive from within this program?

Tell us about these two HD's. What size are they? Are you using RAID. Do you have a logical volume that spans across both drives?

And, did you have problems with the old system and thats why you have updated? If problems with the old system, i see you have not updated the hard drive, right? I wonder, in this case if it isnt your hard drive that may have a problem? Or the way you installed the hard drive? Check your cables.

not had any problems with the hard drives. One of them is a 120gb drive (about three years old) . the other is a 200gb sata drive about 18mths old. they are not raided (was advised against doing this as not of same age). Both show up fine in disk management.

as xp is still on the c drive will boot up fine and run from the c drive. thats the odd part, is cearly working OK on some level but Setup can't see it?

Take a look here:

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/HELP_XP_ins...nd3-t19347.html

does it apply to your situation?

And, do you have another spare EIDE hard drive? if so, try that one and boot off your XP CD and try it that way. See if it then shows the other spare hard drive.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I don't have norton goback on my machine.

I do not have any other hard drives. what I have noticed is that in Bios it only shows the 200gb drive on the first page in the list of IDE's not the 120gb. it has the 200gb (d drive) as the third ide master and no mention of the 120gb c drive) However in the Boot section it gives the choice of both hard drives when determining the hard drive boot sequence?

My c drive is partitioned into a 20gb system partition and a 100gb partition for my documents, would that make any impact on things?

The only thing i can think of at this point is that the bios is seeing the hard drive because you can boot into windows xp, right?

What im trying to do is count out a problem with the EIDE hard drive and the only fast way i can think of is the way i suggested b4 about trying another EIDE harddrive. Other wise the other things i can think of are a wierd mbr making the cd disk not recognize the EIDE hard drive, or something like that. The other thing i wonder? Is the XP cd disk ok?

Lets just say that we think the disk is ok and concentrate on the mbr as a problem. There is a way to wipe out the entire contents on the mbr, did you know that? This will wipe the booting info and the partition information and is extremely risky in the case where you would want to either go back to your windows or retrieve files off your drive. You can try this proceedure , and ill give you a link to the utility that does it, but think of what you will be doing. every thing on your hard drive will be deleted.