1St Build XP Pro SP2 Installation Help

[Charlie W]

I have assembled my first home built computer. It works , so far. I have not installed operating system yet. I ordered XP Pro SP2 it arrived today. I was told by someone on the Abit forums that I might need to upgrade BIOS to the current version for my cpu & hard drive to work right. I have not done that yet. It recognized all drives, cpu & memory on 1st boot.

Seagate told me to let XP partition & format the hard drive. I have some questions about setting up XP. Should I use one partition or two, also what type file system , should I use custom or normal setup ? Or what ever the setup options are called.This board has two SATA hard drive connections & two Parallel hard drive connections. I am planning on adding more drives to these other connections as I can afford in the future. I thought about maybe using another operating system on one of the other drives. Will the way I install XP affect later ad ons ? The XP Pro Version 2002 I got is OEM . Instuctions are not very well laid out. Thought I'd ask someone before I install the O/S . I have done very thing right so far, except when I thought I'd messed up. That turned out to be no problem. I want to get it right the first time.

Last night I read an article, I can not remember the website, it said to go in to bios and set fail safe defaults to install XP. Do I need to do this ? I know I have to set bios to boot from cd. Thanks for feedback.

[Ob1]

go into bios, set boot order to cd rom, save changes and exit
boot to the xp disc
Partitioning the drive is really personal preference, some people like two partitions, one for the system, and one to store all data which helps if your system gets corrupted and you have to reinstall xp, cuts down on the amount of data to backup. if your drive fails though you will lose all data on both partitions. if you create two partitions, create a partition large enough for your system partition, and format all partitions as NTFS unless you are dual booting to an earlier version of windows that needs to be able to read the xp partition. install xp then and install all drivers. next go to disk management by right clicking my computer>manage>disk management>and right click your unallocated space and create and format another partition and assign it a drive letter.

or just go with one large partition during the text portion of the xp install after booting from the cd.

[flanzig1]

Biggest thing with installing XP is after the install asks what kind of installation to do, after you select Install XP, you don't need to touch the system until it asks for a name or the COA code(can't remember which is first.)

[Charlie W]

Thanks for the replies. I am going to update my BIOS and then do the XP install. I thought I'd give the system partition 40 Gb. That should be plenty of room, I would think.

[glc]

Any particular reason you are updating the bios?

[Charlie W]

I was told by one of the moderators on the Abit forum I might need to update to bios 1.6 or 1.7 for my cpu & hard drive to work.

On the first boot the computer recognized CPU, its features like Hyper-Threading & the like. It also recognized memory & all drives. So I do not know if I really need to update BIOS or not. I tried updating last night. When it came up with a prompt to type in file name from program I did not know what to do. I posted on Abit site with no answers so far. I will include that post here if its alright.

SG-80 First Build Bios Help

I tried to flash bios on SG-80 and I did not know what to do when I was prompted for a file name.
This is what I did. I formated floppy with system files from Windows 98 computer. I downloaded Bios 1.8 then downloaded the Flash. I then extracted all files to floppy. I had five files on the floppy.

I set the BIOS in the SG-80 machine to boot from floppy. I first typed runme, it said bad command, I then typed rume.bat, it came back with bad command. I then typed awdflash.exe and up came a window that said: Award BIOS Flash Utility V8.23K
Phoenix Technologies LTD. All Rights reserved
For Sis - 661 - 6A7I4A1AA - 13 Date 10/26/2005
File Name to Program: _________________
Message : Please Input File Name !

I did not know what file name I was supposed to type in. After I wrote the above message down I just turned the machine off.

What file name did it want & will there be other file names I will need to type in. Thanks for help.

[glc]

It wants the name of the bios file.

sg80_18.bin

[Charlie W]

Thanks for replies. Someone on the Abit forum gave me the info i needed to do a successful update of BIOS.