Windows XP MCE won't install

[Waterlogged]

Anyone heard of this?

I'm trying to install 2005MCE to a new computer that I just finished building (my first!), everything went great until I tried to installed the operating system. The computer will boot from the MCE cd disk and start the install process, formats and partitions the disk, starts the install then indicated it is shut down as part of the normal install process but when it starts back up, it just runs through the same process - an endless loop! It’s very frustrating!

Any help would be greatly appreciated

by the way, I'm running an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor in a Gigabyte GA-K8N nforce4SLI mother board. The chip is supposed to support 32 bit but maybe it don't have it set up right?

[Innocent Devil]

Have u altered the source CD

ie nLited else ?

or u deleted the "BOOTFIX.BIN" frm I386 directory ?

The problem might due to that above or due to err in wring the bootsector and setting up the mbr of the drive

[Waterlogged]

thanks for the reply

I did a clean install to a new hard drive SATA 300 MB

with a new OEM MS XP MCE cd

I formated the drive on NTFS, full format, but thats it

[liquidplasmaflow]

LOL, try taking out the CD after the first reboot, then putting it back in after it starts booting from the hard drive.

[Waterlogged]

The problem turned out to be with the mother board interfacing with the SATA hard drive, which is strange because was listed in the BIOS and I could format it. A driver issue may be one cause, also in my research of forums, there seems to a problem with the nForce4 chip, though not with a particular motherboard as all seem to be affected equally.

I noticed that some people seem to have been able to solve the problem by deactivating RAID to all the drives though this didn’t work for me, it would render the hard drive inaccessible and I would get nowhere fast. I happened to have an ATA/IDE hard drive handy which worked wonderful. I simply connected and the install when flawless, which was pretty much definitive proof to me what the problem is with the SATA interface.

While surfing the forums, I also came across one comment that the yellow wire sets that came with the Gigabyte motherboard are for SATAII while the red wires are for SATA. This seems to contradict the literature that came with the board. I’ll be checking this out in the next couple of days.

For the reason why it seemed to partially go through the preinstall of Windows to the first automatic reboot then starting over had to do with the RAM. I’m running two gigs, which is probably enough to handing the first part of the install, and no information was being written to the hard drive. Of course, the information in RAM would be wiped when the computer powered down during the reboot and the process would then start over.

Hopefully this will help someone as a way of passing thanks for posters across the forums, some more helpful then others.