hi

I just bought a new maxtor 160 GB hard drive. I have tried to install windows XP professional onto it, but have had immense difficulty doing so. I am able to boot from the CD-Rom; when it does, the windows setup screen pops-up after loading some files. I believe the setup screen is the ms-dos version, i.e. blue background, grey letters. after going through the prompts, e.g. disclaimer\agreement, partitioning and formatting options, the setup finishes and begins to reboots. as the computer is booting, it should boot to the new hard drive and continue with the installation process, i.e. the nice screen with the windows logo, where you have to enter your registration key, etc.

My computer however cannot find the boot sector on the new drive
during the boot sequence the following message comes up
"searching for boot sector on IDE-0.......boot sector not found"
it then goes onto look at other devices to boot to, and eventually boots back to the CDrom, which then starts the ms-dos portion of the windows installation all over again. no matter what i do i cannot get my new 160 hard drive to boot up after that initial installation. However when i try the exact procedure over again on my old 80 GB hard drive, i can get it to boot and continue with the installation properly

Some of things I've noticed during boot up

1) my motherboard recognizes the new hard drive as 160 Gb hard driv
2) during the windows setup, it searches the hard drive for existing partitions it names my new along the following lines..
" 131 034 MB drive on IDE0...blah...blah has the following partitions:

i've tried a number of different partitions sizes, ranging from 50 Gb to the full 160 Gb as well letting maxblast 3 and windows partition the new. anyhow it seems like the windows setup program is not recognizing my new 160 Gb hard drive. I've read that the Windows XP professional does not have a 48 bit LBA and so does not support hard drives greater than 137 Gb. (windows xp sp1 however does support hard drives greater than 137 Gb--unfortunately i don't have a CD with SP1).

if someone could help me claen install XP onto the 160Gb hard drive, I'd really, really, really appreciate it

Thanks

Howi
p.s. i've tried both the maxblast 3 CD and windows xp CD to partition my drive. In both cases the same thing happens--the boot sector cannot be found on the drive

Hello Howie,
See the following article:
303013
Thanks,
Darrell Gorter[MSFT]

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
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|Thread-Topic: Cannot find boot sector on 160 Gb harddrive after initial
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|Subject: Cannot find boot sector on 160 Gb harddrive after initial setup
|Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:36:07 -0800
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|hi.

I just bought a new maxtor 160 GB hard drive. I have tried to install
windows XP professional onto it, but have had immense difficulty doing so.
I am able to boot from the CD-Rom; when it does, the windows setup screen
pops-up after loading some files. I believe the setup screen is the ms-dos
version, i.e. blue background, grey letters. after going through the
prompts, e.g. disclaimer\agreement, partitioning and formatting options,
the setup finishes and begins to reboots. as the computer is booting, it
should boot to the new hard drive and continue with the installation
process, i.e. the nice screen with the windows logo, where you have to
enter your registration key, etc.

My computer however cannot find the boot sector on the new drive:
during the boot sequence the following message comes up:
"searching for boot sector on IDE-0.......boot sector not found".
it then goes onto look at other devices to boot to, and eventually boots
back to the CDrom, which then starts the ms-dos portion of the windows
installation all over again. no matter what i do i cannot get my new 160
hard drive to boot up after that initial installation. However when i try
the exact procedure over again on my old 80 GB hard drive, i can get it to
boot and continue with the installation properly.

Some of things I've noticed during boot up:

1) my motherboard recognizes the new hard drive as 160 Gb hard drive
2) during the windows setup, it searches the hard drive for existing
partitions it names my new along the following lines...
" 131 034 MB drive on IDE0...blah...blah has the following partitions:"

i've tried a number of different partitions sizes, ranging from 50 Gb to
the full 160 Gb as well letting maxblast 3 and windows partition the new.
anyhow it seems like the windows setup program is not recognizing my new
160 Gb hard drive. I've read that the Windows XP professional does not
have a 48 bit LBA and so does not support hard drives greater than 137 Gb.
(windows xp sp1 however does support hard drives greater than 137
Gb--unfortunately i don't have a CD with SP1).

if someone could help me claen install XP onto the 160Gb hard drive, I'd
really, really, really appreciate it.


Thanks,

Howie
p.s. i've tried both the maxblast 3 CD and windows xp CD to partition my
drive. In both cases the same thing happens--the boot sector cannot be
found on the drive
|

i finally got it to work

it turns out that my bios\motherboard was causing the problem
it's odd but it recognized the drive as a 160 Gb harddrive and worked when it was in slave mode

i ended up buying a newer motherboard (same company ECS) and it's working fine now
thnx for everybody's help! :

Howie