Hi there,

I have a maxtor 80GB hard drive and Win XP Pro will not go onto it.

I have downloaded 'powermax.exe' utility from maxtor and the hard drive passed every single test. It has also passed all scandisks and defrags etc - even turned out ok when I ran 'chkdsk /F'

When windows XP is installing, it copies its initial files then restarts the pc. It then asks if want to install seperate scsi (raid)drivers and then asks if i want to run the recovery console (to both, i ignore) It then blue screens and says that the computer has been stopped to prevent damage blah blah - It carries on to say that i have to check the disk for a virus (which it certainly doesnt have) run chkdsk (which i have already done successfully) but, it will never go past this point. It tells me to restart the PC and try again.....

On restarting the PC, It gives me two choices XP Pro & XP Pro setup (as expected) but, it never gets by the above stage.

The disk has passed every single test i have thrown at it (ive also formatted it 3 times as well as trying 3 different partitions on it - none has worked and im all out of ideas :(

Can anybody suggest anything else to try? Anyone came across this before? I cannot find a bad sector anywhere???

thanks for reading

Red..

I have had trouble installing the os with bad memory. Try installing with half the memory then if it doesn't work try the other half. If you have 1 stick then Oh well.....

Also make sure if your pc has onboard virus prot to turn it off.

May be a dirty or scratched CD. Try gently washing it with warm soapy water.

Mikelds advice is good. If you're installing this on second drive with first still connected, try installing it with first drive disconnected from machine (its easy enough to establish dual boot menu later if you need it - just edit 1st drive's boot.ini or run bootcfg from recovery console)

Thanks for the replys :)

The memory is fine (tried various Corsair bits)

I tried to install onto this drive acting as the only drive but, still it stops me at the same point - anyone else?

thanks a lot

red..