Ok, the story so far.

My son downloaded a trojan which essentially raped my old PC. Instead of fighting with it and trying to remove it, I thought the PC could use a format and reinstall. No problems!

The PC is a conglomeration of bit and pieces. It's a dual core 2.66 with 1.5gb RAM and a 6600GT in it. It's mostly used for web browsing, homework and playing low end games and has ticked along nicely for years.

Prior to that upgrade it was a P4. It has a 200gig seagate drive and a maxtor 40gig drive in it. When it was a P4, neither my BIOS or XP at the time could handle all 200gig of the seagate, so I installed a dynamic drive overlay and partitioned it as 120gig and 80gig drives.

When I booted from the windows CD, I removed both partitions on the seagate and did a full format on all 200gig because my new bios, and XP SP3 would recognise it. I would've thought that a full format would get rid of the DDO, but it hasn't. So when I go to install windows, everything goes swimmingly until it reboots, then it can't boot from the drive because the DDO is f***ing with the MBR.

I've downloaded the latest tool from seagate (seatools), booted into that and it just sits there without doing anything. I've downloaded the old tool (diskwizard starter edition), and that gets to a splash screen and sits there. So I've run out of ideas.

Do you guys know of anything I can use to wipe the drive including the MBR? I seem to remember a "fixmbr" command from years ago that would repair a master boot record, but I wouldn't know how to get to it from the stuff I have. The PC has a floppy drive, but my other one doesn't, so it would need to boot off a CD.

Any help would be muchly appreciated!

Do you guys know of anything I can use to wipe the drive including the MBR? I seem to remember a "fixmbr" command from years ago that would repair a master boot record, but I wouldn't know how to get to it from the stuff I have. The PC has a floppy drive, but my other one doesn't, so it would need to boot off a CD.

You can run these sorts of tools from the Windows recovery console.

Thanks Hog, but it appears that you actually have to have windows installed to use it. The drive has been formatted, and so there's no OS.

There is an option on the XP CD to do an automated system recovery, but it asks for a floppy disk.

if you don't want to screw around with boot disks stick it in a usb caddy

Never mind, I worked out what was happening.. sheesh!

I accidentally set the speed of the RAM when I was setting the BIOS to boot from CD and it was having trouble running anything, including diskwizard. duh!

I accidentally set the speed of the RAM when I was setting the BIOS to boot from CD and it was having trouble running anything, including diskwizard. duh!

LOL! Don't you jsut hate stupid s*** like that....I spent like 4 hours the other day at work fixing the linux server, it kept coming up with a "drive full" error when the drive wasn't full, well apparently the system drive WAS full grrr :|

I've been at this all f***ing day...

.. and guess what? It started installing, and has now just turned itself off. No idea why!

I lost a gig of ddr400 today :(
Intermitant lockup/post issue on my server. Feel a little sad, I liked that ram.

heh mantra trying to take the piss copying fn's sig

:) I love crusty old men ay Jim ;)

Thanks Hog, but it appears that you actually have to have windows installed to use it. The drive has been formatted, and so there's no OS.

Really? Hmm - I thought you could get to the recovery console via the CD-boot from the installer somhow? It seems like that's not needed anyway..

Fn is hilarious. I think I actually like his quote better... Gotta lose the pink though :P

I really don't get this. Whenever I install a new OS for someone else, everything goes fine. Whenever I do it for myself, it always ALWAYS f***s up for some reason.

This time around, I'm able to get about 50% though the install, and the PC switches off. Always in the same place, and it doesn't say anything before it does. It doesn't restart either, like a RAM spasm or general windows behaving badly thing, it just stops. When I turn it back on again, it just sits there with a black screen.

Anyone heard of that one? I'm going to look at taking out a RAM stick and see if it gets past, swapping, trying again etc etc

Argh!

Yeah i'm the same mantra.

Do a build for someone else, fine. When i was a systems builder years ago i'd do an easy dozen builds a day, no issue.

Do one for myself however....

Mantra: tried any Linux utils like gparted? http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Get the LiveCD version.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=271779 worked nice for me last time i had partition woes. Don't know much about DDO though.

last edited by Dan at 13:11:28 27/Oct/08

I think you should:

- Reset everything to default factory settings in your BIOS
- Take out the extra vid/sounds etc cards and use the vid on the mobo if possible.
- Start again, blow away all the partitions.
- Make System partition smaller like 20GB, you don't really need more than that really for Windows XP default stuff.
- If possible use Windows XP with SP2 slipstream into it. I don't get that much problem with SP2 XP install disc
- And yeah like you said, do RAM swap etc.

It sucks then f***ing install screen just craps out without giving you the problem.

Thanks guys. Dan, I've already fixed my partition problem, I have a new and exciting problem! Thanks for the links though, could be handy for the future.

This is an unattended corporate SP3 install, so I would think it should be ok. Maybe there's something the unattended bit is assuming about the hardware that just makes the setup say "f*** this" and give up.

Yeah I try do a normal install and see if that makes any difference.