My First Homebuild Part 2 : Stumped by XP Installation
 

I got my computer assembeled today. It is an Asus a7n8x Deluxe mobo with Athlon Xp 2400+. Got into the BIOS setup, no problem. My problem is installing Windows XP. Right before it is about to start Windows setup, it tells me that there is no hard drive, check cables....

But the BIOS setup tells me the hard drive is there. I've looked at a few tutorials, and they say the hard drive must be partitioned.... but to partition them, you use something called fdisk that COMES WITH WINDOWS...? Plus, most of these tutorials are several years old and don't really deal with XP.

The hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar 40GB. I got it OEM, so no documentation to speak of, except whats printed on the label.

If anybody can point me towards a solution, it would be much appreciated....

if you have another system around make a boot disk it will have fdisk on it (or a linux boot disk for that matter).

As for where fdisk is on the XP CD I don't know...

an old 98 boot disk, then type fdisk into the prompt, and you'll be good to go. :D I seem to remember XP having a partition utility, though, so something may be iffy. be sure to check to make sure your IDE cables are fully seated.

Could it be something with the jumpers on the back of the HD, I know with my WD HD, I had to leave the jumper off to work like it should.

WOOHOO! Switched the jumper from "Master" to "CS" and it fired right up. It was set on "CS" when I got it, but my careful research led me to believe it should be on "Master" so I changed it..... actually my careful research still leads me to believe it should be on "Master", but whatever..... its working now! Thanks all.

Who, cool, glad I could help.

Yeah thanks, tgg7979.... This forum kicks ass...

And if anybody's interested, XP DOES have a partition utility, its formatting my drive as I type this.... I guess the moral is, leave the jumpers on the factory settings alone....

hmm..that is weird. I would think it would need to be on Master also. Is your drive on the same IDE chain as your CDROM?

The jumper shouldn't be on master if you only have one HD. It should only be on master if you have a master and slave setup like me. I have two Western Digital 80 gigers and one is set on master and the other slave. When I only had one of them hooked up the jumper was set on CS, so don't worry about it.

cs will work for single WD drives, i think you can also remove the jumper (place it horizontal across the pins)....puts the drive in single mode.

i remember on my old pc.
the hd went out and i had to replace it.

i had to run the maxblast software so it'll recognzie over 17gigs (it was a 30 gb one). the cd also asked about file system, and i chose NTFS, since xp handles it well.

so, i put a win98 boot disk and damn, it didnt recognize ntfs drives.


so, i had to download xp boot disk's (there are 6 bootdisks and you need all of them for xp) to start the install.

Unless you need to switch hard drives, use Cable Select. It decides what the primary is based on its position on the IDE cable and whether it's on the primary or secondary controller. If you have a PCI HD controller, that acts as the primary controller, and your IDE controllers on the board become secondary and tertiary.

So, if I install a second hard drive in the future, I should leave it on Cable Select as well? Or is that the time to set up the Master/Slave jumpers?

... btw my computer's working really well.... games look great... home building is recommended by me to anybody who doesn't mind doing some research.... it'll make you a LOT more computer savvy in a very short time. and save you hundreds of dollars, if you manage not to destroy anything....

ADDENDUM

I should say I recommend home building to anyone who doesn't mind doing some research AND who already has a working computer with an internet connection. If I had to go to the library every time I needed to know something, it would have taken me WEEKS..... :)

in case of a 2nd hdd you should use first as master and 2nd as slave, something else u can do is grab a small file from the WD website that will format a drive for you, dont rem if it FDISK or not, also look into a free utility (was at one time anyway) called the Utlimate Boot Disk grab from cnet download.com or something of that nature worked pretty good for me in the past