I just finished my build which includes a 250 GB hard drive. I read a lot about how large hard drives are not supported, none larger than 137 GB. I ran the included hard drive software and formatted and partitioned it, and all things were successful. I began to install Windows XP home edition and it said "Setup did not find any hard drives installed in your system" and prompted me to reboot. Both of my partitions were 125 GB and them being less than 137 GB is supposed to solve that problem! I suppose their could be a driver issue but I don't understand which one or what.. It's a Western Digital ATA drive and OEM WinXP. Any help would be great. Oh and I checked all the jumpers and cables and they are all fine.
There is no need to perform any preparation on the disk drive before installing XP. It will do all that for you. I've heard of non-service-pack XP having trouble with large disk drives... I would try using a SP2 version CD. If you don't have an SP2 cd, slipstream the one you have to SP2 and try that.
Ive tried installing windows without running hard drive diagnostics and it told me to run the CD I'd just avoided. I'll try the SP2 idea though, but it's plastered all over the box that it only needs SP1. Thanks, tw SP2 didn't work. I also tried a few different drivers and still nothing. I don't know what to do but try booting from an old small hdd.
try whacking the drive into 4 60 gb partitions, and install windows to the first one. if that works, you can just merge the others into one or keep it compartmentalized (makes defragging, disk cleanups a lot easier on large drives) might want to make a 2gb partition at the end for just swap file also - can really boost windows performance, especially when loading games or large apps like photochop ...
It will make little or no difference having a seperate partition for the swap file as it is still being stored on the same drive... If windows cannot see the drive it will make no difference whether there are many small partitions or any at all...
Thats exactly what I was thinking. I figured it out this afternoon, though. My two optical drives were on one IDE cable with the CD burner the master and the DVD burner the slave. These were on the IDE-1 header on my motherboard. The hard drive was a single drive on IDE-2. I switched the cables to the other headers, and the board recognized hard drive but not the optical drives. I realized somethings wrong with IDE2 so I just booted and installed windows with the CD drive and HDD on the same cable on IDE-1. Thanks for the help, though. Only, I don't understand how I could format the hdd if windows installation didnt recognize it. I believe it appeared as a device when I pulled it up on bios, but the optical drives didnt. Well at least its running now tw
