kunstlerleben

Hey fernando, turns out wasnt a slipstream issue at all - hadta do a proper format of hardrives then used un slipstreamed disc to install and voila. Thankyou for your time though, many regards.

Unfortunately, i know my keyboards alrite as i have another copy of winxp pro (without any slipstream drivers, tried it and it dont work) where it does ask me to press any key to boot from it. it seems as if the way i made the boot here, it just goes straight away...this is such a saga lol

Done that...when i leave the disc in, it just takes me to the setup part 1 straight away after the first restart boot order is already like that.

The problem is, it boots off the cd automatically and beyond my control takes me to the beginning winxp setup screen, it asks me which partition id like to install on, again.

Oh right - should i make another boot cd then? you see the problem with this cd is that it doesnt give me option of "press any key to boot from cd" - it boots itself automatically, without me pressing anything, and it goes straight to the initial windows setup menu

Oh no, i dont think so....basically all i did was take out the cd ater the pc restarted once..im assuming you dont need the cd from that point onwards right? So theres no exchange of cd's or anything...i just take out what i installed with.

Yes, i did boot off the nlited CD and files were copied during textmode part of installation. 1. yes 2. yes 3. This is JUST after the first restart. You know after its copied over the files, then it says "Windows install will now restart pc in 15 secs or press enter" something like that - it restarts, i see my bios screen, then it goes black and the error message comes up. I usually take out the cd while the bios screen is showing, cos for some reason it boots automatically (ie. doesnt give option to press any key to boot from cd). If i leave cd in there, itll justy goto setup part 1 again. 4. No, didnt hit F6, at any point really. It never gives me option during reboot?

I have no floppy disk drive, and its nowhere to be seen on the boot order...:/

Also - i may be an id*** for omitting this info - but my pc actually has 2 seperate HDD - one is 250mb, the other 500mb - both SATA - and since i tried messing around all these installs it seems like there are loadsa partitions which show up in the XP install "which HD to install on" window

Hey - just did a slipstream adding only the SATA IDE folder (using single driver insert in nlite) - and went through xp install - now at point where it should load gui, it comes up with error message saying "This is not a bootable disk. Please inset a bootable floppy and press any key to try again" Argh...it refuses to cooperate! What could i try next? So sorry for taking up your time fernando...

Actually i found in my bios an option to enable RAID (its disabled atm) - am i meanta mess around with that?

nForce raid array? Um no...how do i do that? Could that be the problem?

Fernando - im sorry for this very long post but I've gotten quite peeved at the problem i have and was wondering if you could help me..ive given as much info as possible here. I bought the following pc from mesh. http://www.meshcomputers.com/Default.aspx?...&KEY=224893 GTS QUAD PRo the mobo is an nForce650sli The problem? Basicaly, I had heard of a performance boost in fps for games under xp over vista. i'm personally not convinced that DX10 or vista are doing anything special at all, especially when people came out with the dx9->10 performance hacks for the crysis demo. So, decided to install XP Pro (with SP2), initially as a dual boot. Couldnt for the life of me figure out how to make the xp installer recognise the partition i had made for it, so threw caution to the wind and formatted the drive todo a clean install (ie. over vista...obviously after collecting important files). Right, so vista gone, XP installer copied its files over, then system restarted (at the point which its meanta restart into the GUI portion of the installation) - but i got an error message "disk read error". Tried the install a few more times, same error message comes up. i read around and heard somewhere that vista changes the MBR or something like that, so i went into repair mode in the XP install and typed in "fixMBR". Afte restarting the pc, the error message that came up was "invalid partition table". Right so fiddled about with more installs, this time streaming in nForce SATARAID drivers with the Xp install disk (as per the instructions). Now this time, after i've gone through the first run and it goes to restart, instead of an error message the screen is black, and the PC restarts itself. If i leave it on unattended it will do this in an infinite loop. I used nLite 1.4 to stream in drivers onto my copy of XPpro - specific drivers were the 8.43_nforce_650i_winxp32 drivers, in the SATARAID folder. You mentioned in the tutorial not to d the IDE bit, ie. its unecessary? I've gone through around 5/6 disks trying to get the streaming right and no dice...i'm not sure what to do, it really shouldn't be this complicated should it? Thankyou very much for your time