The OEM 250 GB drive that came with my machine crashed and burned on me last week. I tried Recovery console, Last Known Good Configuration, System Restore, Installing windows to a new partition, booting into safe mode--each of these efforts resulted in a lovely new blue screen. They were all random stop errors, and so I went and got a new 750 GB HD to try and start over. I was hoping to get Windows installed and then plug my old drive back in so that I could hopefully save the documents that were on the unbootable drive. (We have an external HD that I had used for backup, but we found that it had only been backing up Pictures and Videos- not any other directories. :smileysad: )

I got the 750 GB SATA mounted last night and it shows up fine in the BIOS. When I boot to the CD and begin to install Windows, it loads the files fine and then it restarts. Now when it boots to the new HD, nothing happens. The screen just goes black. Does this mean I need a BIOS update? (Althought I figured that since I could see this drive in the BIOS, that it was fine) Do I need to find another drive similar to the one that originally came with the system? The machine is 2 1/2 years old and out of the warranty period now.

I also tried hooking up an 80 GB IDE drive as a slave and that ended up blue screening as well when booting to the Windows XP disk.

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

WinXP Setup does NOT come with SATA drivers

At the fist window, on the bottom Statusbar, there is an option for loading additional drivers. You have to use that to load SATA drivers.

Not-so-small problem. IF you have only one CD-ROM, you cannot remove the WinXP Setup CD to load SATA drivers from another CD. You need the SATA drivers on floppy or a Flash drive (if it can be seen by WinXP Setup) and load the drivers from there.

You do not state what type of HD your old one was, but if it was an IDE it may be easier to just get a new IDE.

Also, if the new SATA came with a CD, you may want to look and see if it contains info, or a tool, to work around this problem with WinXP Setup.

Techno, may I shove in for a second to ask clarification question? I always build my units with two DVD/RW drives; if I have that setup and install SATA drives, and use the Windows XP Pro CD, can you detail a little more the steps to take to install the SATA drivers? How do I put SATA drivers on a second disk to install? I have two 250gig SATA hard drives I am going to do another build with soon, but I don't remember any SATA CDs coming with them.

win xp needs to have the sata drivers on a floppy. it won't even look at another type drive. your motherboard manufacturer will have the drivers to load on floppy. just as setup begins press the F6 key. when it's ready you'll be prompted for the floppy with the drivers then ask which drivers to load. it's pretty simple. if you don't have a floppy drive then a program named nLite can make a winxp install cd that has sata drivers and bypasses the floppy installation routine. nlite is pretty easy to use and is free.

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

thanks Surfer

y'all welcome ranchhand.