Hi I am trying to install winxp pro onto a seagate sata hard drive connected to an Innovision DM8301r sata controller card on a Gigabyte GA7VTX motherborad. I have partitioned and formated the drive using seagate disc wizard. I have downloaded the uptodate sata controller drivers from the manufacturers website (www.ivmm.com) and installed these when asked during the intallation of xp. I am abe to copy the files from the cd and go thru the process of installing the files. I get to the end of the xp installation and restart the pc. The problem is that when the pc reboots i get the winxp splash screen for a couple of secs and then nothing except the hard drive sounds as if it is being accessed every 30secs. I did get a error earlier saying that a file config/system was missing during bootup and was advised to run a repair. I was able to get to xp recovery screen and select my installation but i did not get the prompt where i could type in chkdsk/r. This problem has been ongoing for days and i have removed and rebuilt the partitions, reformatted and reinstalled windows afew times. I have checked to hard drive using seagate seatools and checked the memory- all ok. I have removed all expansion card except for graphics and sata. I have reset the sata ontroller in the pci slot. There is ony one hard drive connected. This is driving me crazy. Any help would be greatly appreciated

burtysoft Did you try Booting from the XP Installation CD and then following Instructions for Partition\Format\Install ? Lesley

Have you tried booting to the XP CD and into Recovery Console? You can try the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR options and that might correct the issue. Leslie is also right, unless you have reason to do otherwise (previous issues, special functionality, etc.) you really want to let the Windows installation create the partition during installation. In my experience this is usually the most consistent and trouble free. As a test you can boot up to the XP installation CD > Re-install Fresh Copy (do not repair) > Delete Partition > Enter > "L" to Lose Data > Create a New Partition > Re-install You can create a partition to whatever size you want provided the hard drive is large enough. I would only worry about creating the "c" partition and just create the rest using Windows Disk Management once XP is up and running. Hope that helps! Michael Live, Love & Google!

I have tried as Michael suggested and I am currently re-installing xp. Will it restart successfully after install. We shall see!!!