Picolini Posted November 10, 2008 Share Posted November 10, 2008 Don't have much time so I'll keep it short and sweet. Made a 10.5GB NTFS partition on my secondary drive. Assigned a letter, formatted, and made it a primary drive (my third one). Had PC boot up from disc no problem. The disc loaded up, went to the install screen. I picked the partition I wanted it to install to. It goes through all the right motions and says "Your computer will restart in 15 seconds and continue set up" or something along those lines. So I let it restart, I DON'T press any key when asked to, to boot from disc. I allow it to just keep going. It continues but just hangs on a blank screen. I tried changing boot order of my HDD's to the secondary drive as the first even, and that didn't work. My boot priority at this time is CDROM then HDD, as it needs to be to originally boot from the disc. Now, when I load up EasyBCD it only shows my Vista (and Windows 7) as available OSs. When I click the drop down list to select XP OSs, it doesn't show and the drive select list grays out. I have an e6600, so I don't think it's a 32-bit, 64-bit problem here. I'm pretty sure my CPU can do it, correct? Any other limiting hardware factors? Any help here guys? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Posted November 11, 2008 Share Posted November 11, 2008 Don't have much time so I'll keep it short and sweet. Made a 10.5GB NTFS partition on my secondary drive. Assigned a letter, formatted, and made it a primary drive (my third one). Had PC boot up from disc no problem. The disc loaded up, went to the install screen. I picked the partition I wanted it to install to. It goes through all the right motions and says "Your computer will restart in 15 seconds and continue set up" or something along those lines. So I let it restart, I DON'T press any key when asked to, to boot from disc. I allow it to just keep going. It continues but just hangs on a blank screen. I tried changing boot order of my HDD's to the secondary drive as the first even, and that didn't work. My boot priority at this time is CDROM then HDD, as it needs to be to originally boot from the disc. Now, when I load up EasyBCD it only shows my Vista (and Windows 7) as available OSs. When I click the drop down list to select XP OSs, it doesn't show and the drive select list grays out. I have an e6600, so I don't think it's a 32-bit, 64-bit problem here. I'm pretty sure my CPU can do it, correct? Any other limiting hardware factors? Any help here guys? Well, I do know that your CPU is very capable of running 64 bit OSes, since it's a dual core. I honestly have no idea what could be the problem. You should take some time to test this problem. If you have a 32 bit version of XP, install that the same way and see if that works. This would test to see if it has any chance of it being a 64 bit problem. If it doesn't work, then it's a partitioning problem of some sort. I looked a little into this and couldn't find a solution or a similar problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leik oh em jeez! Posted November 11, 2008 Share Posted November 11, 2008 Hate it when stuff like this happens. Try starting the vista install from XP, if you can still get to it. (If not, go in with a live CD and fix whatever problem there may be.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Picolini Posted November 11, 2008 Author Share Posted November 11, 2008 @liek omg, by " Try starting the vista install from XP" did you mean try running the install disc IN Vista? Tried it, the Install XP option is faded out. @Vicehog, going to try out a 32bit right now Hopefully I can figure it out, as of now I'm clueless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leik oh em jeez! Posted November 11, 2008 Share Posted November 11, 2008 @liek omg, by " Try starting the vista install from XP" did you mean try running the install disc IN Vista? Tried it, the Install XP option is faded out. @Vicehog, going to try out a 32bit right now Hopefully I can figure it out, as of now I'm clueless. Oh, you have Vista and are installing XP. I thought you meant the other way around. Try setting the hard drive you're putting XP on as the first hard disk to boot from in boot priority. Also, you wont be able to get to Vista after you install an older version of Windows. You might have to reinstall Vista, hopefully you can just repair it, but I've never tried. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Picolini Posted November 11, 2008 Author Share Posted November 11, 2008 Already did that, with the hdd boot order. Didn't work, I believe it came back something like "Invalid partition table" with that. When I leave it to load with the primary first it just gives the blank screen. Already know about Vista not booting. It uses the XP boot loader, and since it's older than Vista it doesn't recognize it. I've "repaired" my Windows 7 install several times to fix the boot loader after "installing" XP. It detects both W7 and Vista, but not XP at all. And the drive goes down right about 1.5GB, so it seems to be installing all the files... I just tried load up the XP Home 32bit on my parents computer (trying to fix theirs, not install the entire XP OS) and it shot out an error saying some damn file is corrupt. About to go test it on my computer, guessing it won't work there either... f*cking sh*t! Just came back from my brother's friends house. He got a new mobo and CPU and tried to install it... got ahead of himself and didn't realize his old DDR ram wouldn't work on the mobo (new RAM won't be in till Wed.) and we just tried plugging everything back in and it didn't start up! And at work the PS/2 mouse went out on the PC that runs the entire office, and 2 of our PCs in my section had issues today... too many computer problems around here lately... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Posted November 11, 2008 Share Posted November 11, 2008 (edited) too many computer problems around here lately... Oh, I've had those days. I've also had quite a few with when you turn on your PC ... you get an error or it just won't boot for whatever reason. So, you end up spending the whole day trying to save your data. There is nothing worse than that when it comes to computers. Edited November 11, 2008 by Vicehog Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Picolini Posted November 11, 2008 Author Share Posted November 11, 2008 (edited) Yeah, tomorrow should be awesome. My parents PC wouldn't restart after my mom installed an ink cartridge in the printer a few days back. It gives an error saying something like "windows can't start due to an error. This may have been caused by a recent hardware or software change..." It gives me the Safe Mode options, Start windows normally, and Start Windows with the last successful configuration, all of which don't work and just restart the PC. Tried a bunch of stuff, nothing worked. I'm probably just going to rip the HDD out, plug it into my PC, copy all the files and let the PC due it's System Recovery thing. Then spend hours installing all my parents programs. Awesome! That's enough off topic, don't want to confuse people here. edit: ON TOPIC.... I trued to install XP Home Edition... same thing. Formatted the drive, intalled the OS. Restarts PC, I allow it to go through past the boot from cdrom, nothing. Blank. If I boot from the secondary HDD (the one its partition is on) I get the "Invalid Partition Table" message again. I'm lost here... Edited November 11, 2008 by Picolini Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leik oh em jeez! Posted November 11, 2008 Share Posted November 11, 2008 Backup data, format everything, and reinstall starting with older OSs first. Between installs, check to make sure you can get to the ones you already installed. Also please note that some motherboards require XP SP2, earlier versions of XP wont work on them. So if possible, use an XP disk that has SP2 preinstalled. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Posted November 11, 2008 Share Posted November 11, 2008 Backup data, format everything, and reinstall starting with older OSs first. Between installs, check to make sure you can get to the ones you already installed. Yeah, if you can't get anything to work, this is your only choice. Though, if you can still boot to your Vista, just wipe out that partition of XP x64 and forget about it, but plan on doing a complete PC reformat in the future including XP x64. Like I said earlier, it's most likely a partitioning problem now and the best way you can try to solve it is to make sure Vista's loader is installed last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Picolini Posted November 11, 2008 Author Share Posted November 11, 2008 Yeah, I've pretty much given up on getting XP on. If/when I do a future install, I'll be making several partitions across several drives and I'll start with the oldest OS and move up. Thanks for any input guys, I know it was a hard subject/problem. Right now I've got my parents HDD in my PC copying some files. Then I'm going to do a recovery on theirs. Hopefully it'll make their PC run smoother, as it hasn't had the OS reinstalled since they got it about 4-5 years ago, and it's been hit with a few viruses and had so many apps installed it's not funny. Just hope it won't need the activation code again (recovering from a recovery partition on the PC), as we don't have it just laying around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now