Set the hard disk to cable select and not master or slave. Make sure that only devices you have connected are set to AUTO in the bios. Ensure the disk is seen correctly in the bios before proceeding. There's no need to boot from floppy and fdisk and format the HDD; just boot to the XP Pro CD and get XP to set up the disk.
Late last night while lying in bed thinking about the problem, I said to myself, "first think to do Saturday morning is to check the jumper setting on the HD." Then, when I read your thread (before looking at the HD), I was almost certain that was the problem.
Sure enough, the jumper was set to Master, and when resetting to to Cable Select, the the BIOS setup screen looked perfectly normal -- the HD was recognized, as was the CD-ROM drive. (I didn't realize that the HD impacted the BIOS settings. I always thought that the BIOS would remain unchanged until intentionally changed by the user -- learned something new!)
In any case, the boot-up process went perfectly fine thereafter, either with or without the startup floppy disk. However, when booting up normally (without the floppy disk) into Win 98, the OS currently on the HD, the computer recognizes new hardware and wants to load the a bunch of drivers. Since this may be an unnecessary and lenghtly process given that I'm going to repartition and reformat the HD, I think that using the floppy disk as a bootup would be better. What do you think?
Set the bios so that the machine boots from CDROM as the first option, then boot with the Windows XP Pro CD - you can then set up the hard disk from there. It is a much better method than the rimarole of using boot floppies....
Setting the CDROM as the first in the boot process worked fine -- as you suggested. I'm now in the process of installing WinXP SP@ directly from the CD. If this works and operates smoothly on the GX110 (with only 256MB RAM and a CPU clock of 500MHz), I may then go and buy a 200GB ATA Seagate Barracuda HD, Model ST3200822A, currently sold by Amazon for US$ 87 after rebates. Hopefully, the OptiPlex architecture will allow for this type of drive but if not, the drive can certainly be used elsewhere.
peterfelgate_ce40d3
1.3K Posts
0
April 9th, 2005 08:00
all-in-time
5 Posts
0
April 9th, 2005 16:00
Late last night while lying in bed thinking about the problem, I said to myself, "first think to do Saturday morning is to check the jumper setting on the HD." Then, when I read your thread (before looking at the HD), I was almost certain that was the problem.
Sure enough, the jumper was set to Master, and when resetting to to Cable Select, the the BIOS setup screen looked perfectly normal -- the HD was recognized, as was the CD-ROM drive. (I didn't realize that the HD impacted the BIOS settings. I always thought that the BIOS would remain unchanged until intentionally changed by the user -- learned something new!)
In any case, the boot-up process went perfectly fine thereafter, either with or without the startup floppy disk. However, when booting up normally (without the floppy disk) into Win 98, the OS currently on the HD, the computer recognizes new hardware and wants to load the a bunch of drivers. Since this may be an unnecessary and lenghtly process given that I'm going to repartition and reformat the HD, I think that using the floppy disk as a bootup would be better. What do you think?
In any case, many thanks again for your help.
peterfelgate_ce40d3
1.3K Posts
0
April 9th, 2005 16:00
all-in-time
5 Posts
0
April 9th, 2005 17:00
Setting the CDROM as the first in the boot process worked fine -- as you suggested. I'm now in the process of installing WinXP SP@ directly from the CD. If this works and operates smoothly on the GX110 (with only 256MB RAM and a CPU clock of 500MHz), I may then go and buy a 200GB ATA Seagate Barracuda HD, Model ST3200822A, currently sold by Amazon for US$ 87 after rebates. Hopefully, the OptiPlex architecture will allow for this type of drive but if not, the drive can certainly be used elsewhere.
George