NEED HELP SETTING UP SYSTEM!!

[CraigK]

I need help badly setting up my new system. everything is installed and the bios has detected all the drives. I'm going practically need a step by step if you guys are up to it.

When I restart the computer, it does the standard tests and checks but the screen stops when it says "Floppy dis(S) fail (40)" what is causing this? it shows up in the BIOS.

[Telexen]

The floppy's ribbon cable may be switched around at either the motherboard connection end or the drive end...Pin 1 (noted by the red/pin line on the cable) needs to point towoard the power source on the drive (left when you're looking straight at the back of the floppy)...the motherboard will note where Pin 1 needs to be on the floppy connector.

[Hopper]

What OS are ya installing?

Do you really need a floppy? Is it old?

I'm thinking the ribbon too, but when I had the cable backards I never got any error messages.

[CraigK]

alright fixed the floppy problem, (cable, duh!)
now I put the WinXP CD in and it says my drive does not have a valid FAT or FAT32 partition which I understand being that I have to put a partition on it. it gives me the 3 reasons for this. I want to partition it and it says to run FDISK from the MS-DOS prompt. should i do this?

[jmebonner]

DP

[jmebonner]

WinXp should offer to do it for you , no command prompt needed. XP uses NTFS, not FAT anyway... Do you have the BIOS set to read from the CDROM first?

XP can run off FAT, I would recommend installing to FAT32 if your drive is < 40GB. I would also just partition a 4-6GB partition for XP and then use the rest for downloads or stuff you don't wanna get hosed if you have to reinstall for some unbekownst reason. (like you'd have to do that w/ Windows)

You can get a 98SE bootdisk from http://www.bootdisk.com if you wanna FDISK and format before the XP install.

[jmebonner]

Seems like a lot of extra trouble rather than just booting from the CD unless, like ER says, it's <40 Gigs.

[CraigK]

I have an 80g HDD, so does that mean i should go NTFS???
besides from that, i went into FDISK and at the top it says

"Microsoft Windows 98
Fixed Disk Setup Program
(C)Copyright Microsoft Corp. 1983-1998"

just so you know, the disk i have is a bootleg, my cousin made it for me. don't jump down my throat about that plz. he saw i had Win98 and asked if i wanted XP so i just said yes.

No, you don't need NTFS.

Using 98SE to FDISK and FORMAT FAT32 will not have any issues w/ XP. You could also just FDISK w/ the 98SE disk and then format as NTFS when you install XP.

Again, if it were me, I'd only partition 4-6GB's for XP and then split the rest up how you see fit. Maybe chunk it up into a DATA drive and/or BACKUP.

If it's an XP bootleg, well, that's your own issue to deal with. Be warned that you could render your system useless if it's a certain copy of XP . . .