80 Gigs Vs. Old Gateway?

[lionhawk2003]

A dear old lady friend of mine asked for my assistance in regards to installing a brand new Maxtor Hdd. I partitioned and formated the drive in Fat 32. Then I went to install XP and the install of XP said there was something wrong and it couldn't load. Could the Bios be what is causing the problem?I partitioned the Hdd with 3 virtual drives so I could set it up on a fat32 format. It's on a Pentium 2 Gateway 1998. Thanks! :)

[HAL9000]

Did you partition it on that machine... did the BIOS recognize the full size of the drive.. how about FDISK.

You don't need to pre-partition and format to install XP, XP has the utilities in the installation to handle that. I would try deleting the partitions and let XP handle thre breakdown.

[lionhawk2003]

The bios did recognize it but the size didn't look right. Also Maxtor provided a utility disk that was really cool to partition and format the drive. And I did it on the machine. I know the bios is old, probably 98 at best. Also, I will always have my doubts on any Windows versions. Thanks Hal9000 :)

[HAL9000]

If the BIOS didn't recognize it right, and being that old I doubt it would, you would either need a drive overlay or a controller card (preferred).

[lionhawk2003]

I'm going there tomorrow night and investigate further. What you suggest would be a good solution. Maybe I should just upgrade the mother board and processor. I'm at a point where I think this would be much better and she will not have to worry about it for the future. Thanks for all your help!

[HAL9000]

Well... guess it comes down to what they want to spend... a drive overlay is free, but not recommended as it will slow the system down a lot... a controller card is cheap... you should be able to get one for under $20 easily. A motherboard and processor upgrade probably isn't worth it as they will probably need new RAM, case, and power supply... with that as a total, it would be best to build a new machine at that point.

[glc]

XP does not get along too well with drive overlays. If you used the Maxtor software and it detected a noncompliant bios, it installed EZ-Bios. This could be what's screwing you up. I'd zero fill the drive with the Maxtor software (Powermax) and try installing XP on a totally blank drive. If it doesn't see the full capacity during setup (a 80gb drive should be seen as about 74 gigs), go get a controller card.

Are you sure that machine has adequate horsepower to run XP well? A P-2 is okay, but you need 256mb ram to do it right.

If this dear old lady is not too computer savvy, you may want to reconsider partitioning the drive - the multiple drive letters can be very confusing for a nontechnical person to manage. I'd personally make the whole thing a single NTFS partition.

Note that Gateways of that era had a "feature" - if you put an IDE controller card in, the primary motherboard IDE controller becomes unusable due to resource conflicts and the system will be unstable unless you disable it in the bios. Use the secondary IDE on the motherboard for optical drives, Zip drives, etc. and only put hard drives on the controller card.

[lionhawk2003]

The nice old lady gave me the authority to configure a new setup. With a 233 mhz board, it only makes sense to update her computer and not worry about it for the next few years.
She is very happy as to what we have chosen and I will call a technican tomorrow to make sure that what we selected will scream. We are going up to a 2.8 ghz machine. For what more money we would have to spend to get this thing up tp speed, it only makes sense. Thank-you for all your help! I am glad that I joined this network because of the support you all have given me in my time of need. You have helped me see the options to problems, and I have LEARNED! Thanks once again. Will let you know how we made out next week.

[glc]

Good move - XP on a 233 is painful no matter how much ram it has. 98SE is the right OS for that machine.

Went to a customer's today - their 17 year old kid decided to upgrade 98 to XP on their Dell 450 with 128 ram and a 12 gig hard drive. Mom had a fit, she uses the computer for business. It would barely boot and it wouldn't go online due to doing the upgrade over a bunch of accumulated spyware and junk. Kid did 2 things right - he didn't convert the drive to NTFS and he saved the uninstall info. 2 hours and $200 later, they had a nice running 98 machine back.

Folks - I don't care if you think XP is the greatest thing since sliced bread (I personally think otherwise), it's not suitable for older machines.