Installing windows XP on a 320gb PATA drive

[Guest]

Hello, Im trying to install windows XP on a new 320GB WD HD that is in an Inspiron 600m. I booted from the DVD/CD drive from the BIOS but the it does nothing, just a black screen, PLS HELP!!

 

[505090]

the dell serial number will not work without a dell disk, if you use another version of win you will need another serial number (different version meaning not dell)

I would try a linux cd for the shear purpose of seeing if it works, as aford10 stated your drive may not be reading cd's correctly

 

[Guest]

ok, I have installed VISTA and it went ok, but when I boot from HDD it says "Disk error" how can it be a disk error when I can install Vista on it and I can format it putting it in a USB enclosure and formatting from another windows 7 based computer? By the way when formatting it only shows 290GB, would that had anything to do with all these problems Im having?

 

[aford10]

Try booting off the Vista disc. Use the repair tools to get to the command prompt. At the command prompt, run chkdsk /r <--This will scan your hard drive for physical errors and try to fix any it finds

If there was a pre-existing recovery partition, did you delete that partition? If not, that's likely where some of your missing space is. However, a 320GB hard drive isn't really 320GB. If you want to read more about that, google binary hard drive space. Your 320GB hard drive is probably more ~299GB.

 

[Guest]

Im gonna try to do smaller partition where the OS may reside and keep all other unallocated then will try using a partition softawre to allocate the space once I get W-XP to boot, everything else have failed, wish me luck

 

[elel]

Luck wished

 

[aford10]

Im gonna try to do smaller partition where the OS may reside and keep all other unallocated then will try using a partition softawre to allocate the space once I get W-XP to boot, everything else have failed, wish me luck

Are you the OP?

 

[elel]

Good point. I didn't know you could post anonymously on this site.

 

[aford10]

If you don't register your account, or you delete your account, your posts change to anonymous.

 

[JohnB_100]

I ran into this issue last fall and there was a flurry of posts here about it. It sounds like your laptop BIOS isn't 48-bit LBA compatible (most older laptops that use PATA drives use only 28 bits), and most laptop makers do not offer a BIOS upgrade to cure this problem. This means the BIOS can handle only 137.4 GB of hard drive space. Since the BIOS only interacts with Drive C, there is a simple cure to let you reliably use the entire hard drive space -- make two logical drives, and make sure Drive C is within the BIOS capacity.

Make sure you are running a recent version of Windows (Windows XP SP1 or later, Windows 2000 SP2 or later or a newer version of Windows).

1. Use EaseUS Disk Copy to clone your old drive (drive 0) to the new one (drive 1).
(If you reboot with the old drive still installed, be sure to disconnect the USB drive.)
2. Install the new drive and boot to it. It will have the capacity of the old drive.
3. Install EaseUS Partition Master and use it to resize Drive C to 137.4 GB.
Verify that Windows Explorer reports Drive C as having 128 GiB or less.
4. Use EaseUS Partition Master to create Drive E and give it the rest of the hard drive space.

Splitting the drive into two partitions this way will save you tons of grief. I have been using these large drives in old P3 and P4 laptops running Windows XP (SP1 or later) for close to a year and have had no issues.