XP Professional Upgrade problem

[johnw]

I recently bought a XP Upgrade to upgrade my current XP Home version
(which I bought a few years ago). Upgrading went very well until the
machine rebooted and started XP Prof. My machine went into a cycle,
rebooting itself again and again after a message is prompted to ask me
to choose a startup method (due to the previous errors):

-------------------
Safe mode
Safe mode without network
Safe mode with network

Startup with the most recent configuration... (something like this)

Normal startup
------------------

I tried all modes and got the same result (rebooting itself).

Now the most scared thing happened:

After a few stressful hours, I decided to re-install my XP Home from
the scratch (you know I cannot upgrade it to XP Home at this point and
have to install a fresh one). I put my XP Home disk in the CDROM
drive, reboot the machine and chose Reboot from CD-ROM to start XP
Home installation. When I got the disk partition screen, the screen
shows that there is no partition for all drives at all, complaining
"Unavailable partition" etc. When I moved up/down keys, the machine
crashed and printed out some critical errors.

Now I am stuck and don't know what to do. It seems to me that it
cannot find my hard drive. However, if I chose to continue XP Prof.
Upgrade (there is a choice for continuing upgrade along the
installation if I reboot from XP Prof Disk), the system went back the
XP Prof. upgrade steps always from "Preparing..." step and finished
the steps one by one without any problem (But when the machine
rebooted, it got the infinite reboot loop again). So this tells me
that my hard drive is still there and working. By the way, I have a
Seagate Serial ADA Hard Disk Drive with 160GB, and my previous XP Home
worked fine before I upgraded XP Prof.

Thanks for your generous help in advance.
John

 

[Rich Barry]

John, since you have a SATA Drive check here
http://www.techimo.com/forum/t122868.html

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/serialATA_FAQ.mspx#EJAA

You can also do a clean install with your WinXP Pro Upgrade CD.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

 

[johnw]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the pointers. Now I remember that I had to hit F6 to
install Promise FastTrak driver while I installed Home two years ago.
I forgot it completely. Fortunately I found the driver disk (the one I
recently downloaded didn't work for me at all) and installed a clean
XP Prof without any problem.

I still don't understand why I cannot upgrade Home to Prof if I have
Serial ATA Hard Disk? Is it fare to say that Prof upgrading process
doesn't copy my FastTrak driver from Home to Prof installation? At
least, it didn't give me any chance to hit F6 for the driver-. If
so, Microsoft should fix the problem since Serial ATA Hard Disk
becomes very popular these days. I hope they are reading my message.

Anyway, thanks again for your great help.
John