problem installing windows XP

[akaneria]

Hi guys,
I just bought my computer parts, fitted it together and now i tried to install windows xp with sp2 intergrated into my hardrives. They are the western digital 250gb & 500gb sata II, 16mb cache.

Basically what happens, i boot up with the cd, it boots up fine, it identifies both drives as 500gb and 250gb, but when i come to installing the program, i create a new partition on the 250gb drive by pressing "c", then it asks if i want to install xp, by pressing "enter", when i do this it says something about partition being full, and it cant install it.

I just bought these hardrives, do they need to be formatted first?

thanks

[pow4]

Hi guys,
I just bought my computer parts, fitted it together and now i tried to install windows xp with sp2 intergrated into my hardrives. They are the western digital 250gb & 500gb sata II, 16mb cache.

Basically what happens, i boot up with the cd, it boots up fine, it identifies both drives as 500gb and 250gb, but when i come to installing the program, i create a new partition on the 250gb drive by pressing "c", then it asks if i want to install xp, by pressing "enter", when i do this it says something about partition being full, and it cant install it.

I just bought these hardrives, do they need to be formatted first?

thanks

Yes you need to format the new drive before the fresh install

[akaneria]

does it not format the drive before it does the windows installation, thats what normally happens when i install xp, it asks whether i want full or quick format before it installs xp

[Thorsson]

What size partition are you creating on the 250Gb drive? Is this drive C?

Sounds to me like you are doing something wrong at this point, but it's hard to know what exactly. Go here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313348 for detailed explanation of steps to follow.

[akaneria]

hi,
could it have somthing to do with the jumpers,
on both hardrives, there are no jumpers at the back where the pins stick out.

[s3ds]

jumpers on the back of sata drives usualy just limit to sata150 with jumper sata300 without
1 GB = 1024 MB so if you want a 50 GB drive you need to enter 51200 when it asks for the size of the partition ( see Thorsson's post )
if the partition is unformatted it should give you options to format ( NTFS / NTFS - Fast or FAT32 / FAT32 ( FAT32 option will only be there if partition is small enough)
another good tool i have just started to use to create and resize is a Ubuntu Live CD

[akaneria]

i will have to try again when i get back home this evening regarding this installation problem

[TheReaFireblade]

does it not format the drive before it does the windows installation, thats what normally happens when i install xp, it asks whether i want full or quick format before it installs xp

Can you tell if it actually performs the format?

[akaneria]

i got it all sorted thanks,
it asks you whether you what to format the drive full or quick, then installs xp

It all works now, not sure why it didn't work before!

[s3ds]

glad its now working