Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Opshon]

Yesterday I bought a motherboard for my pc .So now im at a point of fustration because I can't install windows xp because the computer says that it cannot read the hard drive. Now thats the problem. When I  first hooked it all up and launch the computer. It loaded where I last left off. Windows 7 with a continue and a repair option. So I pressed  Start windows  It started loading but then a black screen stuck there. Rebooted. Got" Disc read error pressed CTRL + ALT + DEL". I get that whenever I don't boot to CD. So I am trying to install XP but it after I get past partition manager I get cannot continue. The wierd thing is, there are 3 partitions. They are all unknown partitions. Also thers a unpartioned space with 109 megs. My total hdd memory is 500gigs. Its wierd but I have a Seagate Barracuda® 7200.12 Desktop Hard Drive. Please help me.

Ive already tried changing ports, CMOS, and making sure it was spinning. I felt the vibrations and the lights were blinking for HDD. Also when I did reset CMOS and it came up with the MSI log. It showed my HDD. So plz tell me what to do.

[Cantbecanit · Accepted solution]

Chipset problem, what you should've done is before you broke the old system down, you should remove all the MB drivers, sound and graphics,usb etc, this doesn't always work though, so to save time, slave the drive and get your files off of it, they should still be readable, if they aren't use Powerdatarecovery free version, once all is saved, wipe the drive and start fresh, always best to whern you do a heart transplant anyway, hth.

[fzabkar]

If I understand correctly, you are saying that when you boot from a Windows XP CD, you can see the hard drive, but the partitions are of an unknown type. This is probably because Windows 7 has initialised the drive with a GUID partition table rather than MBR. Windows XP understands MBR, but not GPT. In the latter case, all it sees is a "protective MBR".

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

You need to reinitialise the drive after deleting the existing partitions.

[Opshon]

1 question. What if I boot up a windows 7 recovery disc. Will it respond and recover. Or is it too late?

[fzabkar]

When you say "recover", do you mean that you wish to recover your data, or do you simply want to be able to use your drive again, without regard to the existing data?

[Opshon]

SInce I had windows 7 installed before. I mean. At this point I was trying to see if I burned the recovery disc would it bring it back to live with windows 7. Like a reinstallation. I might just wipe the hdd like what the other person said. Start clean. Reinstall windows xp. Later on install windows 7. Thats what I want to do. 

[Opshon]

I don't really care anymore at this point about the files on it.

[fzabkar]

I don't know anything about Windows 7, but you could boot from the Win 7 CD and use it to delete the existing partitions. Then reboot from a Windows XP CD and reinitialise your drive.

Otherwise you could use a bootable CD version of SeaTools to zero-fill your drive, and then install your OS.

[Opshon]

yea. I just burned Dban disc and seatools disc. I will use seatools first

[Opshon]

Bad news I guess guys. On Seatools, it scanned for the drive. Found it. Then I clicked short test and it failed. It said I had some bad sector problems and that I should run long test. I ran long test and it failed and said bad sector problems too. I did accoustic. Nothing special. Then I did Erase Complete. It failed too. Telling me to check my cables. Its wierd because I could hear the hard drive spinning.