Installing XP ( home )

[Wishmaster]

Last night i contructed a computer for a mate, first time so i considered it went pretty smoothly.

We used the old 98 floppy he had to format the hard drive. Then upon instruction from another friend, got it to load form the cd drive through the bios. ( cant remember exactly )

Well now it loads up and i can go to the cdrom.

It shows a blue screen with a grey bar at the bottom which has "loading" the cycles through various bits and bobs.

It then changes to "loading windows" iirc and stays there. My question is how long should this stay like this? He reset thew computer after it was at this stage for 10-15 minutes, as he thought it had crashed.

Im going back down tonight to sort it out. But i need to know if im doing this right!


Saying all this though. The computer booted up fine card and it was great fun!

[John Prophet]

there shouldnt really be any extended time where it is just sitting there doing nothing...the whole process should only take like 25-35 minutes maybe...or something along those lines.

Actually you didnt need to even use the floppy...you can just boot off of the XP cd and it would have formatted the drive for you....as a matter of fact, I think personally I would boot off the cd and let it format the drive and try the install again....I would let it format the drive just to make sure none of the failed install remains to mess things up etc.

JP

[Wishmaster]

Thanks mate. Im heading down ther ein a few mins. Hes phoned to say its booted up and ready to partiotion and format the the disk.. Not sure about the options though. Gonna do a full formaty into NTFS? Thanks anyway.