Installation of XP Pro recycles over, and over

[stephanie]

I have an ASUS P4C800 motherboard, Intel 3.3gh, 2 gig ram, and good drives, I think. After having a functional IDE master and slave, and everything working fine, I attempted to set up a RAID. It basically went "FUBAR" and then I salvaged one drive and it worked fine as a single IDE master drive. The OS, programs, and files were perfect.

Then, I attempted to salvage data on the other disk that used to be in the RAID array and failed.

I tried to boot from the original IDE master drive from the IDE cable and socket and I could not boot. The drive id partitioned, thank heavens, into C: for programs and D: for files. I could not reboot! I cannot explain it.

I tried to reload Windows XP Pro on C: and I got through the first half of installation after refortatting NTSF perfectly. When the system restarts install the second half of XP Pro, it just cycles through the begginning of the installation over, and over. I cannot finish part Two of the install.

I have never been so stymied and frustrated.

Can anyone help me?

Stephanie

 

[Exluddite]

And you chose this message board to ask this because...?
:D
Sorry, I had to say it.
I have to assume that you were using a RAID set up for redundancy rather than striping if you got anything useful off the first drive. In which case the second is..redundant? The second might not have a boot sector though..but don't quote me on that.

If The RAID set up in on the motherboard, check your BIOS settings.

Check all the BIOS settings anyway.

Double check your cabling.

Check that the jumpers on the drives are correct.

If the big issue is getting the data off the one drive, look here:
http://www.grc.com/
or bring it to a shop.

Make it a dual boot system and put a Linux distro on the second drive.

Use firefox.

(OK, the last two are just opinion)

 

[Erik]

Hopefully someone here can help out, Stephanie, but since we generally talk about vintage gear here I moved your question to our off-topic area.

Best of luck with your system!

Erik