I had XP Pro, bought a new computer (Dell 8300) with XP Home, and am trying to install the Pro on it. It only goes thru a few steps, shuts down and restarts in a dual boot config for Home and Pro Setup. If I choose setup to continue, it crashes. Checking the "setuplog.txt" I noted an entry: LookupAccountSid failed. Error = 1332 Any other errors in the logs appear to be due to the incomplete install. Is it trying to recognize me by my prior computer? I don't know what else to look for to get this working. This is a full version of Pro from Microsoft. I added my old hard drive as a slave for file transferring and would like to switch everything over to the new larger drive and prefer the Pro. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Lynn Lynn

Try booting into the Home Edition, then do a re-format on the new drive if there nothing on there your keeping, use FAT32 file format for this. When complete, create a folder on the newly formated disc. Copy the Entire contents of the Pro Edition CD into that folder. Try booting from a floppy into DOS, go to the newly created folder and go into the i386 folder, then run winnt.exe to run the setup for the Pro Edition, this will allow a CD free installation of the Pro Edition and may help.

Thanks for responding. I do have stuff on the other drive but was thinking of partitioning the new one (120 gig) and using part of that. Will that work? Or I could move everything from the slave on to the new one. This might be tricky though as it has Pro on it. It was my last master. Lynn

Perhaps start afresh: initially repartition the 120Gig drive (using a '98 bootdisk) to have a Primary partition (make it as large as you feel you want - at least 5Gig. as this is a "large" drive... You can format it as fat32 if you wish at this time or, leave it unformatted and allow XP-Pro setup to format it fat32/ntfs accordingly. Also if you do format it as fat32 initially it can be reformatted during XP-Pro setup as ntfs if so wished. The balance of the drive can be configured etc. later from within XP (Disk Admin tools). Then run XP-Pro seup via a CD boot (or even the 6 floppies...) and install to the Primary on the 120Gig drive - set as Master to older drive as Slave. It may work out easier (wiser/safer?) to simply disable the older drive during reconfig/install to 120Gig drive (i.e. set 120Gig as stand-alone Mster - no Slave). This would remove it totally from the equation...; also removes the risk of screwing up the older isntallation... Once Pro in OK on 120Gig drive, reconnect the older drive (Slaved) - remember to reset jumpers accordingly on both drives. Then boot to XP-Pro on the 120Gig drive and access the boot.ini on the older drive; copy across the line that refers to XP on that drive to the boot.ini on the 120Gig drive. Then change entry for rdisk(0) in that (copied across) line to read rdisk(1). Be sure you change the rdisk entry in the line copied from the older drive boot.ini - not the one newly installed/created on the 120gig drive. rdisk(0) (on the older) refers to that drive when it was the Master drive; it is now a Slaved/second drive thus rdisk(0) becomes rdisk(1). If you were to reset the older drive as Master the boot.ini therein will still have the original reference " rdisk(0) " and allow it to boot as before. Note: the 120Gig drive will be referred to as rdisk(0) when it is set as Master (with/without Slave). (Hope I'm not belabouring the point or teaching Grannie to suck eggs with the above explanations...) All being well you should now be able to boot to either version. Both will boot as c: since each version was installed when its drive was Master (for NT/W2K/XP drive letters are stored in the registry and this is consulted during boot-sequence). Each version of XP (when it boots) will assign a different drive letter (other than c: ) to the other Primary, but this should cause no problems. Use Disk Admin Tools on 120Gig version to configure the balance of 120Gig drive. There is a routine (for XP) that will automatically locate/add the other version of XP (on the older drive) to the boot.ini on the 120Gig drive; but the cut 'n paste option I suggest above is really kwik/easy/simple to do?

The new larger drive is a master on SATA and the older drive is a master on EIDE. Lynn

Ummm.. My experience re SATA drives is zilch; so I can't advise in that regard. Nonetheless I can't see why, providing it is correctly installed and the MoBo can support it(?) that the installation routine I suggest above would'nt work OK? However one installs/configures a SATA drive as Master (no Slave) shouldn't detract from a pretty standard installation as outlined above? Perhaps (hopefully) others (with experience of SATA drives) can advise more re' installation/config etc. of such a drive?

I'll try it with Partition Magic. Thanks for your help. Lynn