I currently have a IBM Thinkpad 600.Im in the process of reinstalling Windows XP on to the system.Setup goes fine until Windows formats the partition, its at this stage where its currently taken 5 hours for this stage to get only 10% completed.Is this a problem? or may this just be normal because of the old harddrive and system?
Ive never heard of a system format taking 5 hours. but as u said mayb because of your hard drive it can be aging to the stage that it needs to be replaced.
How long does it take using Quick NTFS Format? I remember only one installation of XP on a machine that actually took 3 days to complete!! Turns out the setup program had serious problems with the internal cache of the Celeron CPU. Once we disabled it, it installed in 45 mins.
Well right now its still formatting,Its been about 24 hours and its at 59%. Yea let me just say now that the copy of Windows Xp being installed onto the system is a copy. But i`ve never had problems installing it on to my other systems. What i was thinking was maybe it was a problem with the hard drive but when i think about it , if the probelm was the harddrive i dont think windows setup would have even got this far through the process.I wouldve thought setup would have got stoped way before this stage if is where the harddrive issue, what do you think?
IBM Thinkpad 600E Type-2645 Processor-Intel Pentium II 366 MHz Memory -64MB Hard Drive- 2.5 Inch Hitachi 12GB Bus Speed-100 MHz all that i know of the top of my head,i`d give you more specs but i cant access them because of the format taking place right now.
If you're still formatting,...try canceling it. Restart the setup process and try Quick NTFS. If that takes more then about 20-50 seconds to complete...the drive might be on it's last legs. Either that or there's something else wrong with the chipset or memory that might be making the process of running the setup difficult for the system.
intresting update here maybe you guys can help me out on whats going on now.That NTFS format finished and like the genius i am, after Windows rebooted and the "press any key to boot from disk" screen came up. I pressed enter.So whatever...... windows setup recopied the setup files that had already been copied and i then relized i messed up so when Windows setup rebooted i bypassed the boot from disk..... and up came "setup cannot contiue please reinstall <windowsroot>\system32\dat.dll .Im not sure if this is a software problem or if its a harddisk problem.I went into Bios and tested the harddisk and no errors came up,i also tested the systemboard and that came up fine but when i think about it BIOS testing wouldnt show certain problems on the systemboard,there could be probelms and it wouldnt show up as a fail.But im not sure what to do im all outa ideas . The NTSF quick format doesnot work which lead me to beleive it was a harddisk problem but im not sure anymore.Im thinkin to maybe format onto FAT32 rather then NTFS but i really dont wanna go into all of that with FAT32.Im also thinking that when i started reinstalling the setup files i may have caused Windows setup to bring up that error.......ANY HELP PLEASE?!!!
@yankee317 Boot up your computer again. Go into bios and then go into Boot Sequences and change it so that it boots from your CD Drive first. Then save settings and exit. [bold](before you exit put in your Operating System CD)[/bold] After you reboot it should check your CD Drive first and then ask you to press any key to boot from CD and then do that. Then you should be able to run through the setup normally.
With that laptop sitting on the very edge of XP's minimal installation specs, I'm starting to wonder if that may also be an issue. The format process no matter the OS, shouldn't take very long at all. The big difference between normal and quick, is that normal does a surface scan to detect unusable areas of the drive, and marks them so no data can be written to them. Quick, is the same as the format procedure used by the diagnostic/install CDs that come with hard drives. You might try a low level format...which means you'll need to get the drive's diagnostic software, downloadable by ISO to burn to CD...and run the diagnostic program. The low level format option will be in there somewhere. Then, try setup again. XP will tell you that "it's a new drive"...where you can create your partition from scratch.
Hey i`ll try it.Anything at this point ......a while back i used IBM`s secure data disposal on a diffrent harddisk so like you said i`ll go with that.But what you said makes sense ,about Windows Xp requirments and the age of my system. all tho i didnt have a problem installing the operating system on last time.Do you think rather then installing XP maybe i should install Windows 2000,to see if it goes thorugh better??? i never had any of these problems installing Windows onto any of my other systems,only with the Thinkpad i have another 2.5 inch harddisk i was thinking maybe the current harddisk had errors so i tried putting in the other travelstar harddisk but it didnt even register in setup nor did it come up in BIOS setup,however i can here that harddisk running im thinking it needs to be formatted but i cant format if its not being read.
