NeilScarrott

All, I thought i'd post this after many hours trying solutions from these forums without success. Hopefully this posting may help others solve a problem in future. My setup MSI 6570 (K7N2G-ILSR) Mobo PC2100 512 MB Crucial RAM (2x256MB Dimms) Athlon 2400 WD1600 160 GB Sata disk (SATA port 2) Seagate Barracuda 80 GB disk (SATA port 1) Seagate 40 GB drive (IDE 3) Asus 52x CD burner (Primary IDE) Pioneer 108 DVD burner (Secondary IDE) Cisco 350 PCI Wireless Tyan Tacheon 128 MB 9600 PRO Graphics I recently purchased the WS1600 160 GB Sata drive and intended to migrate from the 80 GB drive to use the 160 GB drive as the primary drive and install XP SP2 onto it from my automated install CD. After reading various tutorials I got the promise drivers onto the disk via txtsetup.sif All seemed well and the disk was picked up from the Promise 376 controller. The text setup completed fine, the first graphical setup completed fine, but after the reboot into the final graphical XP setup I got problems. Booting into safe mode revealed that when mup.sys was reached, the system hung and rebooted itself and this would repeat. I thought this could be the promise driver revision and tried various different driver levels, from the original drivers I received with the mobo, to drivers from the MSI website, all with the same problem. This was extremely frustrating as my previous install worked fine with my 80 GB sata drive so I knew I didn't have any of the memory or power supply issues that others had experienced. The solution, I stumbled across some internet postings saying they found issues when they repartitioned an NTFS disk drive. Up until getting the 160 GB drive I had always used FAT32 for my disks, but XP insisted on using NTFS for the 160 GB drive so that was what I used. After loading a Win 98 boot disk and formatting the partition in FAT 32, I carried out the automated windows install (using the Promise drivers supplied with the motherboard) and windows installed without problem (XP SP2). I do not understand why using NTFS caused problems versus no problems in using FAT 32, perhaps somebody here knows? Neil