trouble installing XP

My master hdd recently crashed, which is never a good thing. I had two hhd's. XP was installed on the slave. i bought a new sata hdd and set both to single. the bios detects everything beautifully but then i have problems. it comes ot a screen that says put in boot media. i put in the XP home upgrade CD and it went and did the whole blue screen ****. Then i chose to install XP. it says that i dont have a version of windows already installed so i cant install windows. BUT I DO HAVE ONE INSTALLED! it's on the IDE hdd that i had as a slave, before. when i use the CD to use the recovery console it detects the previous install but I dont know what to do now. I took out the new hhd and tried booting from the old hdd but it came up with a insert boot media screen! am i seriously gonna have to buy a full version of XP? maybe i'll wait till vista! haha

 

Welcome!
The message "put in boot media" indicates that the BIOS can't find the boot code in the MBR of the hdd. Running fdisk /mbr in DOS will fix it if format is FAT and running repair console from the XP CD to do fixmbr will work in NTFS.

"dont have a version of windows already installed" means that the install is not on the default drive as seen by the CD program. One fix might be to disconnect the other drive, so the CD sees only the drive containing windows.

A bit more info might also be helpful, e.g. did you investigate the crash? what were the events around the crash?

 

the crash was caused by me dropping my hard drive on the concrete (don't ask). but it was an accident. I tried using only the one drive to boot from but it gave me a insert boot media thingy. How do i do the fdisk thing? it's fat32.

 

Use a floppy that boots and contains the fdisk program, such as a win98 boot disk or download the contents from here.. Boot to DOS and at the a:\> prompt type fdisk /mbr

 

thats a great site but which boot disk do i use? the 98 or XP?

 

i tried a 98 boot disk and it said it is invalid. I've never had an SATA drive before so do i have to install the driver during the XP CD boot thing? will that help me out?

 

98 for FAT. The "invalid" floppy is bad; make a new one. Or get one from a friend who runs 98.

SATA makes no diff.; if BIOS sees it, DOS should, too.

If you're using CD you should tap f6 when asked and insert the SATA drivers on a floppy.

 

i tried a 98 boot disk but it told me that it was invalid! any clue?

 

oki did the whole fdisk /mbr thing. now what? windows still wont redognize that i have windows on the old drive! i also installed the sata driver.

 

sorry im stupid

wow i said that the floppy was invalid twice! oops sorry. also i just remembered that i had the old drive partitioned in half. half was D: and FAT32 and the other was G: and nfts. D: had windows on it.

 

If you've disconnected the other drive and are using only one drive at present, your first partition on that drive is c:, not d:, no matter what it used to be called. With the DOS disk, and at the A:> prompt, type dir c:/w. If the response. is a list of files, the disk is ok; if an error, you'd best run fdisk again and remove all partitions from the disk and re-partition it and reinstall windows.

 

well for some reason it is D but i don't care anymore i fixed it. When windows told me to insert a vaild Windows OS cd i went and borrowed 98 from a friend. How simple is that? wow thanks any guys!

 

Thanks for the followup. Glad you were able to sort it out.