Hi, i just completed a new build for my parents and the last peice to come was a 160gb maxtor hard drive. No accompanying CD's etc, just came in a jiffy bag. I hook it up, run xp pro setup disk, and when i restart, an error appears just after the bios loading screens. I do some research and aparrently there needs to be some fiddeling in the bios. I need to change the IDE hard drive settings from 'Auto' to 'Large'. Except the cheapo motherboard i bought for the build [Elitegroup ECS 945gzt-m] doesn't have that option. So i muck about with the settings and try a few different things. Nothing seems to work. Then all of a sudden, when i boot i get just a black screen with a white cursor prompt, ala MS-DOS. I have tried hitting F8 for the boot menu and loading the CD-ROM, and the Hard drive; but nada. Again nothing works. Any ideas on how to get out of this mess? Set-up: Pentium D 2.66 ECS 945gzt-m motherboard Maxtor 160gb hard drive, diamond seris
I don't think it's a hard drive problem. Using the auto setting for this hard drive should be fine. Does the bios recognize the hard drive?, if it does than your hard drive is ok. I think your ecs elitegroup motherboard is ok, I've owned a couple and they recognize every hard drive I throw at them. Maybe you need to reset your bios settings to default and start all over. One thing you need to do is set your bios to bootup from hard drive first, then cdrom 2nd. That way when your computer starts to bootup, when it doesnt find a boot partition on the hard drive it will look in the cdrom next for the xp installation boot files. I think the error you are getting is because, it's not setup to look anywhere else for a boot file.
Tried that, and no luck. The boot order is now: HDD DVD FLOPPY [i dont have a floppy - i assume this is the cmos or rom?] I reset the motherboard by removing the battery and then replacing it. But i still get the same blank screen with a white flashing cursor "_" :s
