Hard drive will not boot after installation of Windows XP

[torx11]

I have a brand new hard drive my friend gave to me after he upgraded to an SSD. It originally came from a laptop with Windows 8 installed. I installed the drive in my laptop and installed Windows XP successfully.

However upon boot up it would display the message: Disk read error occured press ctrl+del+alt to restart."

The mystery is I can install Windows 7 on the drive and it would boot up correctly. Somehow Windows XP would not install on this drive.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

 

[ronintexas]

What is the size of the drive? There were size limitations for the maximum partition size for Windows XP....it has been so long I don't remember....but SP2 and SP3 made them larger....It may be easier to install Windows 7 or 8 on the computer if you want to use that drive.

 

[torx11]

Thanks for your reply. The size of the drive is 500 GB.

The thing is my computer is an old laptop. The drivers for it are only Windows XP and Vista. I have tried to play around with the Windows 7 but it is missing a lot of drivers.

 

[ronintexas]

Your best bet may be using it as an external USB drive - putting it in a USB enclosure....From what I was reading - you have to manually partition the drive to a smaller size (i.e. 100GB to start), then install Windows XP, then all the service packs through SP3, then use a partition manager to extend the partition to all 500GB. It worked for some - others had issues. And of course, Microsoft doesn't support XP.

3rd option may be the best - try installing Ubuntu on it.

 

[torx11]

You got to be kidding me. I just did what you said and partitioned the drive to 80 GB for Windows XP installation and it worked.

Thank you so much for your time in helping me with this. As a last question, do you know why I had to set the partitioning to a smaller volume prior to installing Windows XP but not Windows 7? Somehow Windows 7 worked without me me partitioning it to a smaller size.

 

[ronintexas]

Windows 7 supported larger hard drives. When Windows XP came out, the typical hard drive was 40GB or 80GB. It was a limitation in the OS. When you finish installing the service packs (1, 2 and 3), you should be able to extend the partition in disk manager to the full size of the drive.

 

[torx11]

Thanks for your assistance, everything came out great! After installing the updates I was able to extend my hard drive to the full 500 GB.

 

[ronintexas]

Your welcome! Would appreciate a "pick as the solution" 🙂