Screwed up install, can't format

[TorontoKid]

ok guys sorry if this is a bit repititious. I think I know what went wrong. When I did a fresh install of xp, I didn't change the boot order and alot of the stuff from my hard drive was already there after xp installed. I guess I had all my old drivers already there conflickting with what xp tried to install. So I went into bios and changed the boot order so that I could boot form the xp disc. That worked fine, but now I've screwed up the install somehow. I read that I didn't have to do an fdisk to do a clean istall of xp, so I just booted up. I chose to delete the only partition the my HD had. Then I selected to install xp in the one new partition. When asked if I wanted Fat32 or ntsf, I chose ntsf, then it started formatting the drive....it took forever, but when it finished, i got this message "Setup was unable to format the partition, the disk may be damaged. Make sure the drive is switched on and properly connected to yor computer. if the disk is a scsi disk, make sure your scsi devices are propertly terminated. Consult your computer manual or scsi adapter documentation for more info. You must select a different partition for Windows xp. to continue press enter"

But I can't install in the other partition because it is only 8mb. I then chose to delete the large partition again and try to install it again, but I got the same error message. When I reboot, I chose not to hit any key so it just boots up, but it say it can't start the operation system.

Any ideas how I can install xp and fix the problem? I know that my disc is not damaged, so what am I doing wrong?

Thanks

[Laptop Slave]

What have you done to be sure that the hard drive is good? Sometimes they seem to run fine until partitioning or formatting. Taking a long time to format is not a good sign.

Try installing on another hard drive if you have one available. Or get the diagnostic utility from the drive manufacturer and run that.

[TorontoKid]

well, I just tried to install it again, and just to check, I picked to format the partition using FAT32 instead of NTSF and this time it worked. But my whole point of installing xp was to get arount the 3.99 GB limit, so I need to get this working with NTSF. IS there a way to convert it to NTSF after the installation?

[Laptop Slave]

Yes, there is and please read the entire response before running this command as you may not need to.

After you complete the install on FAT32 go to Start>Run... and in the Open box type "cmd". This will take you to a command prompt. The command is as follows:

"convert [drive letter:] /fs:ntfs"

or in your case:

"convert C: /fs:ntfs"

Type "exit"
You will get a message telling you that the convertion will occur immediately after the next reboot. You may also get a message to confirm that you want to do the convertion. The convertion is one way. You can't go back to FAT32 without using a 3rd party utility or reformatting (and then reinstalling the OS).

FAT16 has a 2GB maximum partition size. XP should be able to format a FAT32 drive at least 32GB. NTFS partitions can be up to 2TB (2048GB), which with today's hardware might as well be infinite because you won't find a 2TB hard drive.

You shouldn't need NTFS if you are just trying to get a partition over 4GB. FAT32 should be able to do that just fine.

You may want to use a manufacturers utility to zero out the drive. I don't know what OS was on the drive before, but if it was any version of Windows, XP setup should have been able to delete the partition without a problem.

[TorontoKid]

Thanks Steve. I will do that. Now I have the system running but with FAT32, but I'm back to my original problem, which is that I have no sound. I have an ASUS k7v mobo with via onboard sound (VIA AC '97 Audio Controller) Windows loaded the driver, and it says "Drive is enabled but not funtioning properly"...I have checked that it is enabled and installed. I can't figure out why I don't have sound. When I go to make sure that it is set up as my default audio device, it's not even listed.

[TorontoKid]

ok, I got it going with NTSF. Now I've noticed that when windows xp was installing it was not able to copy a file called "swenum.sys" I'm not really sure what that is but from what I've been able to find i think it's something to do with Directx. I don't know if that has anything to do with my audio drivers not working even though they are installed and they are the enabled. Any ideas anyone?