XP question

[Andy]

there isn't anything in my BIOS looking like that.

that the one you mean??

if you wanna give up fella i understand, don't think its fixable lol.

 

[DBcoup]

hmm well if those options aint there i would think that the bios installed is restricted by P/B known as 'bios locked'. thats how they make lots of money by charging ppl like you £50 for a £2 disc!
The cheapest option open to you is to do a clean install of xp onto your IDE drive and just use that, (not forgeting to alter the boot settings in the bios). If you find that 160gb is not enough you can always buy a larger one at a later date, up to 750gb soon to be 1tb.
Sorry i couldnt help more, its just difficult over the net lol. Good luck

 

[Andy]

yeah no problem fella i understand. your help has been much appreciated

 

[Sjdickso]

Sorry lads i was not around to help, By the looks of it everything that DBcoup has said i agree with, your best bet is just boot from the IDE drive run your clean copy of XP from that and either sell your SATA drive or buy a external caddy for it Andy

 

[Andy]

yeah might do that Simon, the other option is to buy a PCI card similiar to the one i posted earlier in the thread. i could run the drive from that yeah?

 

[Sjdickso]

Yep that would work as well, when / if you buy the card just make sure all drivers are inc with the card.

 

[Andy]

ok cheers Simon, will do

 

[Andy]

right sorry to be asking questions again lol but i've just formatted the partition on my IDE drive with vista on and installed XP.

while i was installing XP when i got to the screen where it asks you what drive/partition you want to install windows to it was showing both partitions of my SATA drive even though i hadn't pressed F6 to install drivers. do you think it will be safe to format 1 partition on the SATA drive and install XP there?

 

[Sjdickso]

You could try, but make sure you have all your data backed up before hand. Are you Deff sure it was the Sata drive that the XP install could see and not just a old install of XP on your IDE drive. You should be able to tell this by the size of the partion / disk.

 

[Andy]

it showed up 2 drives both with 2 partitions.

 

[Sjdickso]

Your other option is to boot the machine up with xp cd in and just have cd-rom and sata drive plugged in and see if windows gets to the point where it see's a disk. if this is the case then you will not have to load the addtional SATA drivers on by pressing F6 on intial install. I have found that this is the case with some intel M/B.

 

[Andy]

ok cool, will give it a try tomorrow, only just finished installing XP and other stuff to my IDE drive lol

 

[Sjdickso]

If the install see's both drives then it sounds like you dont have to have the addtional sata drivers then, as said though andy before you re-create and partion make sure there is nothing important on any of the disks / partitions.

 

[Sjdickso]

Ow well, it if works ok on your IDE drive just have your SATA drive as a data drive.

 

[Andy]

yeah was thinking that but the IDE drive is the bigger driver and was used before as a backup drive.

 

[Sjdickso]

Just buy a external drive then if the SATA drive gets full up, you can get 400gb ones now for around £60inc vat. I know what you mean though it is annoying when you to have it setup a different way. I will just confuse the sitution a bit more and say you could do a disk to disk ghost, from IDE to SATA ( i dont think we should go there though LOL)

 

[Andy]

lol, no think thats a bit above me by the sounds of it

 

[Andy]

well i took a gamble and run the xp instalation disc again and when it asked where to install to i chose the main partition on my Sata drive. It formatted the partiotion and XP has installed fine on it

 

[DBcoup]

i thought you said you didnt have the instalation disc anymore? notsure.gif

 

[Andy]

i don't, i borrowed a mates copy of XP home and used the product key on the side of my pc. thats what this thread was originaly about, wanted to konw if that could be done.