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I have a Seagate scsi drive and an Adaptec scsi card. I had the drive installed in WinXP as a storage drive. It was formatted to NTFS. I shutdown and removed the IDE drives and attempted to install XP onto the SCSI drive. When the install gets to the part to pick where to install, it says the drive does not contain a valid WinXP partition. Yes I did hit F6 for the mass storage drivers when asked. I took the option to delete the partition and then picked to create a new partition and now it says that the partition is "raw". WinXP still refuses to install to the drive. Comes up as an "Unknown Disk". Any suggestions ?


*Edit* Fu@king XP is pissing me off. I reconnected the IDE drives and when it booted to XP it said that due to major hardware changes I will have to reactivate. Win98SE is starting to look good again.

Hehe. I don't like that activation crap either, which is why I setup my wife's pc with Win2k pro. I'm still running Win98, but as soon as I need to reformat, it's going to be Win2k pro.

In your situation, I would use a Win98 boot floppy and run FDISK. Then delete all partitions. Then boot with the XP cd and run the install. It will detect the drive with no partition info and format it for you as FAT32 or NTFS. About the ony other issue would be your bios. Make sure that SCSI is the first boot device after the install.

Corperate edition rocks...

I tried a Win98 boot disk and it says I have no hard drive. It can't find the SCSI drive. Right now it is installed as a third hard drive and it is formatted to NTFS again. I also set the drive as "active". I am almost tempted to dig out the Win98SE Corp CD and give it a try but I'll have to format to FAT32. I won't use Win2K, it sucks and always has.

*EDIT*
[idiot]I forgot to enable the adaptec scsi card to allow booting to the hard drive.[/idiot]

You may need to change a setting in BIOS to make the SCSI drive the primary boot device.

What FP said. Make sure that the SCSI drive is your primary boot device. Disconnect all IDE drives until after the install process is complete. I'm going from memory on my XP Setup util, but once a partition is "Raw", don't you have the option of formatting it?

Also, check adaptec's web site for updated XP drivers fro the SCSI card. Note that there *MAY* be different drivers for the setup process than for an installed copy of XP (wierd, I know but I've seen it). I have a 19160 and haven't had any problems installing XP on it.

Originally posted by NascarFool
*EDIT*
[idiot]I forgot to enable the adaptec scsi card to allow booting to the hard drive.[/idiot]

As you see, I posted that I fingered it out. I forgot to enable the SCSI bios. Looks like the drive will be used for storage or on a folding machine. It's too slow compared to my WD 40gig ATA100 drives. The SCSI drive benched at ATA10 specs. ( I know there's no such thing as ATA10 but you get my drift) Just for G & S, I did a fresh install of XP Corp SP1 with the nForce 2.41 drivers (saved from some time ago), the Cat 3.6 drivers and DirectX 9. It benched at 14,126 at 15x140. The SCSI drive is a Seagate Barracuda 9.1gig 7200 RMP. The seek time is supposed to be 8.7 or 9,7 ms, it benched at 15.3 ms. Kinda slow, I think I need to make a change in the SCSI bios settings.

Originally posted by Sean
Corperate edition rocks...

Don't you mean "c0rp0r@3 3di7i0n r0X..."?