Problems installing Operating System (Any)

[fivetricks]

I am tryng to install an OS an a miachine and Im having a problem.

Ill start with this, as it seems to me to be important information....

When you boot the machine (with or without an OS installed) you see the following

HARD DISK 1 NOT FOUND
CD-ROM 1 NOT FOUND

PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE, PRESS F2 TO ENTER SETUP

There is nothing installed on the IDE cables in slot one, only in slot zero, one HD, one CD-ROM, that's all.

The problem is that when you're installing to OS, (98SE or XP) and the systems restarts as it should you get this screen again, and the machine starts over, fresh, therefore you have to start the installation process over again. It's an endless loop, to which there is no end.

If you check the BIOS under installed devices, HD slot 1 says "NONE" as does CD-ROM slot 1.

So Im not sure why it keeps trying to detect these items and then failing the whole startup process as a result.

Any Suggestions?

P.S. Also, when you try to install 98SE, it will only format 100MB of space in FAT16, also which confuses me. There is probably some standard procedure that im missing so please bear with my ignorance. Thanks!

Just as an add on note. When trying to install XP, when the cd asks for the restart ("your computer will reboot in 15, 14, 13, etc)
and you try to boot from the drive at that point you get everyones favorite:

DISK READ ERROR
PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL TO RESTART

[ski]

Disconnect the CD-ROM drive, jumper the HD as Master, connect the IDE 1 cable to the IDE 1 channel and connect the HD to the end connector of the IDE 1 cable making sure the colored stripe along the one edge of the cable is next to the power lead on the back of the drive and next to pin 1 at the MB connector, start up, go into BIOS and make sure that 'autodetect' (or similar) is configured for recognizing the HD, and see if the HD is recognized.

If it's not recognized, then connect it as Master to the IDE 2 channel.

If no luck, then connect a different power lead to it.

If still no good, then install a different known working IDE cable.

If that does not work, then start with a Windows 98 boot floppy inserted, select 'Start without CD-ROM support' and press Enter, at the A:\> prompt type dir c: and press Enter.
If it says 'Invalid drive specification', then the HD may be bad.


If the HD is recognized in BIOS, then reconnect the CD-ROM drive as Master or Slave on the IDE 2 channel, and make sure it's recognized in BIOS.
If it's not recognized, then it may be bad.

[david eaton]

when you try to install 98SE, it will only format 100MB of space in FAT16, also which confuses me
When setting up the partition using FDISK, did you enable large disk support? If not, then the disk will have to be repartitioned.
Boot with a WIN98SE floppy, run FDISK.
When asked if you want to enable large disk support, click on yes.
Delete the existing partition, and make a new one using 100% of the available space.
Close FDISK, reboot, and format the new partition.