>>>>I have a couple XP Pro disks. I have tried to reinstall a number of times using both disks onto different boxes. What happens is I get to the part where I'm supposed to press F8 to confirm to the agreement, and nothing happens. Nada. If I hit other keys - just for kicks - I get a blue screen with errors. I can't recall now what it was, but it basically meant I was toast and had to hard boot to get out. I have used both these OS disks in the past successfully, and even on one of the boxes that it fails on now. Any ideas?
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>>>Googling the text of the BSOD should get you the answer. If you get a lot of hits you can narrow it down with one or more of the error codes that are returned as well e.g. 0x000000cd
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>>>One wild guess - IIRC early versions of XP Pro didn't come with SATA drivers. So, if you are installing to an SATA hard drive, you need to download the appropriate driver to a floppy disk, and during the XP Setup CD boot press F6 when prompted to load that driver:
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http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314859>>>
>>>Also, IIRC there can be issues installing early versions of XP on disks larger than 137GB:
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http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013>>>
>>>One workaround for this latter issue is to create the system partition to be less than 137GB and install XP on that, then create another partition (e.g. E:) using the remainder of the drive.
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>>One of the hard drives has some proprietary stuff going on where it says that you can't install the OS without using the original restore disks. I don't want to install all the crap that came with it. Is there a way to wipe the hard drive without using the OS install? In the old days I would have done FORMAT C:, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
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>XP Setup has a basic partition manager built-in. With that, you can delete any partitions that already exist on the HD, then tell Setup to install XP on the "unpartitioned space".
You've got to get past the message from the PC that says it cannot install an OS that is not the one supplied with the restore disks. This pops up immediately when it tries to boot from the OS disk.
