Installation trouble and DVD problem

Hi folks

Just found this forum and i am really am need of some help.
I have 2 problems

First I have a DVD writer in my system that for some strange reason suddenly stopped being able to be opened except during windows startup. This worked fine previously and after having fitted a second plain DVD drive in, the new one works fine np.

My second problem started off as I was trying to use a hard drive that I had sitting around. It is a maxtor 200gb with 8mb cache which stopped working a while back and I never got around to trying to fix it until today.
After checking the drive with partition magic (since i had used that to make a partition on the drive previously) I was getting an error saying bad partition geometry.
Now I managed to get this fixed in the course of trying to set it up as my main boot drive during the windows installation. |I just deleted the partitions and reformatted the drive during the xp install procedure.
Everything worked fine and the boot cd copied all the relavant setup files to the "new" hard drive but when it had finished installling these setup files it reboots as it is supposed, and then after going through the regular checks it gets to the bit where it says "press a key to boot from cd ", but then it just stops and hangs...it doesnt seem to access the hard drive as it normally would.
Now ive tested the hard drive with my old install and I can see the installation files on there and have moved files on and off the drive numerous times np, so it seems to be working ok.
I have also tested this trying the hard drive to be the only one installed (ie no second drive)
I checked the bios and the drive is correctly set up there.
One thing i did find is that in windows *** is only being showed as a 137Gb drive even though it is actually a 200gb drive. I checked again trying to rerun xp setup and it only recognizes the drive as having 137gb avaliable
In device manager it is recognizing the correct drive name but shows that i have 63409MB unallocated.

I dont know if you need this but i am running an athalon 2800+, 1GB ddr ram,Ati 6600 graphics card. The hard drive in question is a Maxtor 6Y200P0

Phew alot of typing sry.
This has got me totally stumped and any help you could provide me with would be much appreciated.

 

I would check to see if you are getting proper voltage at the 4-pin Molex plugs. I would also check your IDE cables. To see more than 137GB on the hard drive you would need to have SP1 or better on your XP disk. If you don't I would create a slipstreamed CD. It could also be that the Bios on your motherboard doesn't support large drives (older motherboards).

 

Thanks for the reply

My Bios does support the larger drives and recognizes it correctly. How would I go about creating a slipstreamed cd???

 

one of many from google on 'slipstream xp'

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp

 

You are in a great situation. A drive that does not have an OS installed.

I suggest making two or several partitions on the drive, not just having one BIG C: drive. Having a small drive/partition for Windows means it does not have so many directories and files to search through. Put your data (save files) on another partition, that way, if you need to format the Windows drive and reinstall, all your data will still be there.

Check the drive again with Partion Magic and see if you receive that error again. If you still receive the error, try using the Maxtor utilities from their website.

You (virtually) have a blank drive. You can try anything you like.

You can wipe the drive completely if you want (this will ensure there are no faults in the boot sector, including things like boot sector viruses or a corrupt MBR). Do a low-level (zero) format using the Maxtor utilities, but do not install EZ Bios if it is offered afterwards.

A 200Gb C: drive? Windows will spend all day (or many milliseconds ) looking for things. A reformat means losing everything.

You have not mentioned that you are setting multiple partitions, but I would strongly advise it.

Matt