I recently had one of my hard drives crash. The hard drive I had setup(Hitachi Deskstar 160GB) as a slave had no operating system, it just had copies of a lot of data from the older, much smaller drive(32GB).
I went ahead and removed the old drive and set my secondary drive as master. BIOS sees everything as I would expect(of course, I am no pro at this). I have the boot order as CD-ROM, Floppy, Hard Drive. When I boot up with my original(bought it at Frys Electronics) Windows XP Home Edition SP1a disk, I do get to the Windows Setup screen fine. It asks me to read and accept terms, and asks which partition I want to load Windows onto. I select the partion and had it formated into NTFS(Quick) just to be safe(I had originally made the filing system NTFS when I first formated the drive after installation). It continues installation without a hitch in that it load all the appropriate files into C:\Windows and then says it will re-boot and Setup will Continue. This is where the issue is!
When the computer re-boots, it says if I want to boot from the CD-ROM, push any key.. I go ahead and do that, and the Windows setup screen appears again and the install starts all over. The first time I thought it was all part of the process, but then after accepting the terms and saying I want to install windows xp, it says an operating system exists on my drive and do I want to install over it.
What am I doing wrong?
Sorry for the long explanation...