WinXP Install - Update

OK......I had a few more tries last night.

First, I went back, wiped the disk and re-installed Win98SE in compact
mode. That took about 15 minutes - the machine and CD are both pretty fast.

Then I tried to do the fresh install rather than the upgrade. That went
fine until it booted the WinXP setup and asked me what partition I wanted
to use. Well...I wanted it to use the only partition there was - wipe it
and do fresh install (as suggested).

Um...no. Can't install into the Win98 partition....or at least STRONGLY
advised not to. Not interested in a flakey result...so decided to
re-partition and have another try.

So created a 1GB Win98SE partition...installed 'compact' again...and then
in the XP setup, created one big partition (56GB) out of the rest of the
disk.

Then told it to format NTFS (not quick)......and it got to 96% and went
into a loop for an hour.

Hmmm....OK...Reboot and straight back into XP setup (good!)...and
repartition again - creating a 15GB partition....leaving the rest blank.

That worked....and WinXP is now installed and working fine.

 

....and after all this, discovered that I can now boot from the XP
install CD....which I could not do before - despite many attempts.

 

As per my previous comment, it seems like a HDD problem. Bad sectors maybe.
It happens, even with relatively new HDDs.

 

You do not need to Install WIN 98 at all.

 

what if he also wants to be able to user 98? It is quite useful to have as
some apps and games will not work properly under NT

 

Actually I got mine stuck once, and no matter what I tried I couldn't
get the HD right from the Win XP partition setup by booting off the
WinXP CD.
I ended up booting a Mandrake CD to wipe the HD partition, then used
XP to set it up. It just couldn't deal with what was already there
for some reason, but once I used Mandrake to clean off everything that
was already there, XP was sweet.

 

Yeah....so it seems. In the end, I didn't include the last 3GB in the
fional partition...and everything worked fine.

The odd part is that with linux I had no problems using the entire drive.

 

I suspect I should have done this. I have seen such odd behaviour before
from hard drives....having been playing with them for at least 15 years
now.

 

Ahh, there's your problem, linux is known to destroy HDDs. ;-)

 

It's the cancer portion of Linux that destroys Hdd.

 

I've had dodgy installs of XP with different CD Roms. Try another cd rom if
you can.

Rider