WTF? Win2K installer reports it can't format a NEW drive - partition is corrupt...

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 7:38 pm

Which is B.S. the partition is fine. I made a 6gb partition on a 60Gb Drive, tried to have the Win2K installer format it and it tells me there's something wrong with the drive.

WTF?

Running on an IWill XP333 mobo and I know I don't need to load a special driver for the W2K installer (not using the RAID version). It sees the drive fine.

Am I missing something here? I know I've installed W2K on a 60Gb drive before with no problems.

I'm going to low-level the drive and start over - maybe try another Win2K CD - maybe this one is screwed up....

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 7:59 pm

Well apparently this is fairly common with both Win2K and WinXP - I see a lot of references on the newsgroups but no solutions yet.

I get this specific error when I try to install Win2K:

"Setup has determined that Drive C: is corrupted and cannot be repaired". Setup
will now close Press F3 to continue."

I'm running the WDC Lifeguard utility right now to make sure the drive is okay, but I had Win98 running on it just fine so I think it's B.S.

Anyone seen this before?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 8:47 pm

Okay I THINK I found the answer. Got this from WDC's site:

Windows 2000 by default does not support ATA 100 data transfer rates. Microsoft has added support for ATA 100 in Windows 2000 with the release of Service Pack2. This can be installed once Windows 2000 is loaded on the hard drive. If you are experiencing any issues during Windows installation, disable UDMA mode in the system BIOS. Once the installation is complete and you have installed Service Pack 2, enable UDMA again. For more information about Stop errors, click here: Install issues and Stop errors

Never ran into this before because I never installed anything but an ATA66 drive on a Win2K system.

Good to know for future reference.

SHEESH. A whole day wasted on this....

Jim Z · Post by **Jim Z** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 9:25 pm

did you partition with Win2k setup, or something else? I've installed 2k (plain and SP1) on ATA/100 chipsets many times with no problems, spanning the Via 686B, Via 8233, nvidia nForce, and Intel ICH2.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 9:42 pm

Tried partitioning with Win2K setup, FDISK, partition magic, even the WDC Lifeguard floppy.

In the process of re-partitioning now. I'll let you know if this works.
------
EDIT
------

YUP!

That fixed it. Running the drive in PIO mode and Win2K is in the process of installing properly.

You have no idea how many people are posting this same problem in the newsgroups and no one has posted a fix. Even MS's knowledgebase was useless.

JIMZ: Were any of the drives ATA100?

According to the info I found what matters is whether the drive is running in ATA100 or 133 mode.

Also, I would assume if it's a RAID controller or card based controller and you have to install drivers for it using F6 in setup, that there's probably no issue since the controller's driver takes care of ATA support.

Busby · Post by **Busby** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 10:37 pm

Why don't you make an integrated Win2k CD with the latest SP and then it will include support for it.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 10:51 pm

I don't do this often enough to bother, but I may now since I'll probbaly run into this on a client system eventually.

Jim Z · Post by **Jim Z** » Sun Aug 11, 2002 1:14 am

JIMZ: Were any of the drives ATA100?

Yep, all of them. But they were IBM and Maxtor...

According to the info I found what matters is whether the drive is running in ATA100 or 133 mode.

Might be a peculiarity with either your drive or chipset, or the combination. though you've obviously installed on the drive before so I think that rules that out. unfortunately, I've not used the ALi Athlon chipsets so I can't offer any insight.

Also, I would assume if it's a RAID controller or card based controller and you have to install drivers for it using F6 in setup, that there's probably no issue since the controller's driver takes care of ATA support.

makes sense.

You have no idea how many people are posting this same problem in the newsgroups and no one has posted a fix. Even MS's knowledgebase was useless.

Is it unique to this chipset? I was aware of the problems that pre-SP2 had with UDMA-100 controllers, but it was my impression that the symptom was crap performance, not corruption...

wpublic · Post by **wpublic** » Sun Aug 11, 2002 1:25 am

ha!, FP you are feeling some of my pain. however, i tried to install win2k on a RAID array, and i am convinced one of my disks are dead. i have installed on ATA100 many times, but i think something about the RAID totally crapped out my drive. knowing what i know now, i coulda got it done, following the proper sequence, but i wonder if that inadvertent RAID chip on your board might have something to do with the problems you are having.

p.s. i disabled UDMA on my dead drive and still didn't work, cause i guess it's dead.

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Sun Aug 11, 2002 2:35 pm

Like you FP, I always used a ATA66 or ATA33 drive, but now that I have slipstreamed SP2 on the CD, I guess I don't have to worry about this problem, but thanks for the info anyway.

DocSilly · Post by **DocSilly** » Sun Aug 11, 2002 7:16 pm

I baked my own slipstreamed CD's since SP1 .... well, I still have to do the SP3 but I've been to lazy ... but my slipstreamed SP2 CD works perfectly.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Aug 11, 2002 10:19 pm

JIMZ: The posts I found on the newsgroups were for a variety of mobos, so it's not just an ALi thing.

I posted a reply with this info on a couple of them to help others.

System's running fine. I upgraded to SP3 and re-enabled UDMA. Got nearly all my apps installed on the new system, and my desktop the way I like it.

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Sun Aug 11, 2002 10:22 pm

wpublic you seriously need to shorten your sig up by a lot! i scrolled a bunch just to get by that. Anyways glad you got it figured out FP. I had it happen to me once but it wasn't with any of my XP333's. Was with a Asus CUSL2 and a 15 Gig ata100 maxtor drive. I was putting Win2k Server on it to play around and for the life of me could not get it to load. I finally just low level formatted fdisked in a 5 and 10 gig partition loaded win98 then took off with win2k server from there and didn't have any problems.

wpublic · Post by **wpublic** » Mon Aug 12, 2002 1:51 am

i was gonna take that sig off before i was gonna post in this thread, but i forgot. it is gone now. sorry.

but i am trying to install win2k on the other good WD 40GB drive just to hold me over till the new drives come in. i have also ran into the same problems as FP again. i used the WD data lifeguard utility to disable UATA, but i can not find in the BIOS anything about UDMA. i also get the "drive c: is corrupted" errors in windows setup.

how do i set my drive to PIO mode ( is that something to do with the jumper setting, mine's on master right now? i got 5 settings, CS, Slave, Master, no description for the fourth, and PW2)

and how do i disable UDMA in the bios?(Gigabyte 7dxr+, w Award BIOS, just flashed to F8)

i see under integrated peripherals "ECP mode use DMA", options are 1 and 3(default. i changed to 1 and will try to run setup again.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Aug 12, 2002 5:21 pm

Depending on your BIOS, there should be a page that has a settings for each IDE channel (on my board it's in the Integrated Peripherals Menu).

It'll look like this:

Primary Master [auto]
Primary Slave [auto]
Secondary Master [auto]
Secondary Slave [auto]

Change whichever channel the drive is connected to (should be Primary Master) to PIO instead of auto.

You may have two sets of settings (my board does) one for PIO and one for UDMA like this:

Primary Master PIO [auto]
Primary Slave PIO [auto]
Secondary Master PIO [auto]
Secondary Slave PIO [auto]
Primary Master UDMA [auto]
Primary Slave UDMA [auto]
Secondary Master UDMA [auto]
Secondary Slave UDMA [auto]

In this case you want to DISABLE the Primary Master UDMA and leave Primary Master PIO set to auto.

Another way instead of messing with BIOS is to just conenct the drive using a 40 conductor cable instead of an ATA66/100/133 80 conductor cable. That'll force the drive to run in PIO 4 or ATA33 mode which the Win2K installer can handle just fine.

Once you install the lastest Service Pack you can set it up to use the faster UDMA mode.