Installing Win XP Pro On New Hard Drive

[Paul]

My old hard drive crashed. I bought a new Western Digital Caviar,
40GB drive and put it into my PC. I have a copy of XP Pro that I want
to install onto the new drive (I was running XP Home on the drive that
crashed). I went through the following steps to install XP Pro on the
new drive:

1. Used an old Windows Me floppy boot disk to boot to a command prompt
2. Used FDISK to create a new partition on the new hard disk (created
only one partition as I only plan to run one OS on this machine.)
3. Formatted the partition (FAT32)
4. Ran the XP Pro install from the DOS prompt. Did so by running
'winnt' from the CD-ROM directory E:\I386\winnt. During this step in
the process, Windows install asked if I wanted to switch to NTFS,
which I did.
5. Windows XP Pro install process began which included copying files
onto the hard drive (which took about an hour!).
6. Was told by the install process that the computer needed to reboot
in order to complete the install process. When the computer rebooted,
the hard drive spun for several minutes, then stopped. The screen was
completely blank. I turned the monitor off, then turned it back on
and now I have these very strange blue, black and white vertical lines
running across my monitor. The hard drive isn't doing anything,
neither is the CD-ROM, which has the XP Pro install disk still in it.

I'm at a loss for what happened. It appears that the install process
simply stopped mid-way. Other than a new hard drive, no other
hardware changes were made (i.e. I'm using the same video card). BIOS
is recognizing the drive correctly, drive is first in boot sequence.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

 

[wayne]

try booting without the Cd in the drive if that fails Boot straight from the
CD which you should have done before and reinstall.

IF for some reason you cannot boot from CD just do what you did before but
copy the whole I386 directory and try running setup


Wayne