Installing Windows/Seagate Harddrive Frustrations

[Calibound88]

So I finnally got my first computer built after much angst and frustration (specially those intel stock coolers )

Everything is done and I booted up bios. Insterted Vista and was on my way.

Problem: vista is trying to "save" all its crap, cept it can't find "drivers" for my hard drive (seagate 250gb). I was like "what the hell", seagate said they don't have drivers to download and their support is absolutely crap.

After screwing around for an hour I decided to install my xp home edition.

It recognized the harddrive and I went through a quick format. After it was done it rebooted automatically and tried to start up from hard drive. Then a message "A disk read error occurred; Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" SO WTF?

Then I retried xp and did the full format which took another good hour. It rebooted and when it got to the same part as last time and now it just keeps on restarting for no effing reason.

Is there problem with hard drive, bios ?
Any Ideas?

 

[dude_se]

how wierd. clearly the drive is being picked up so i cant see why the bios settings / cables should be setup wrong. are the discs legal, and/or scratched?
cant you just install xp or vista to another disc and then once you have an os to work with then it will be easier to find the problem.

 

[Calibound88]

Yes, both discs are legal

Xp is from dell and vista is from a licensed distributor

 

[DJ-CHRIS1]

Yes, both discs are legal

Xp is from dell and vista is from a licensed distributor

Dell XP Discs WILL NOT work on a non dell computer properly for starters.

Also, the drivers you need are for the motherboard SATA controller, not the hard drive. Try loading those drivers and see what happens.

 

[Atomic Rooster]

I sounds like the problem you are be having is trying to boot to the hard drive when you have no OS installed. The formatting part is correct, but when you reboot, you need to boot to the CD to install the OS to the drive.

Is the Dell XP CD a full version of the OS or is it a system recovery disk?