Fresh Install problems (weird)

[McSquid]

Background:
I recently rebuilt my computer with a new motherboard and ram. Both of which work %100 fine. i decided that to keep with the new computer flavor i would also wipe one of my drives and do a fresh windows xp (home) install. so i did, and everything went fine until i realized that my drive letters were messed up. so i looked it up and found out it was because i had reformatted the boot drive with other drives installed so one of them defaulted to C: . ok, no big deal. ill just disconnect the other drives and reformat and install xp again so my boot drive letter will be C: and then reattach the slaves. right? WRONG.

Problem:
I simply CANNOT make the installation finish. it will work fine up until it restarts to continue the rest in the prettier "welcome to xp" screen. when it reboots i get a black screen. waited 1 hour and nothing happens.

Things i have tried:
Reformatting with both quick and normal partitioning
Using the xp recovery console to use both FIXBOOT and FIXMBR
Using the XP installation repair
changing the SATA channel of the drive
chkdsk


cookie to whoever gives me suggestions
cake to whoever figures this out (lie)

[glc]

Zero fill the drive. If it's an IDE drive, jumper it to Cable Select.

[McSquid]

would the western digital diagnostic tool do that? zero fill is a new term for me but i asssume it fills errors with zeros. how does one initiate such a process? its a SATA drive btw.

[mickzer]

Try DBAN:
http://www.dban.org/

mickzer.

[glc]

Yes, WD's diags will zero the drive. It fills the whole drive with zeros - puts it back to factory blank condition.

[McSquid]

bah this thing just doesn't like me. The computer refuses to even TRY to boot from my floppy drive. i made boot disks of western digital diag and the disk nuker. both wont boot. i managed to get the disk nuker onto a flash drive and boot from it, however it failed. (non-fatal error has occurred) now i cant find any way to get the western digital diags to install onto a flash drive nor can i seem to find any other way to "write zeros" to the drive (i used the power of google to no effect) any suggestions?

[glc]

Download the CD .iso and burn a boot CD.

[McSquid]

never mind that last issue. it was a stupid solution. apparently when i was cleaning out my floppy drive with the compressed air the other day, i kicked up a chunk of dust that wasn't bothering anything into a place that it WAS bothering something. i tried the air again and a big chunk came out. now it works. writing zeros as i type this. thanks a ton for the quick reply though

[McSquid]

All set. install went fine after the full erase. disk passed all extensive tests and took xp just fine.

i now only have one more question, on my previous install when i pressed CTRL ALT DEL i would get a full screen menu that would override any full screen applications. it was really useful for full screen game lockups. now all i get is the task manager. is there any way to switch it back?

thanks so much for the help by the way.