PCTech Forums

when i try to reinstall it says it cant install it on my hard drive. i dont understand what the problem is though. it mentions it might be x86 or something.

how do i get it to install? its been awhile since i last did it so i dont remember what or if i had to do something extra.

this totally sucks. i think windows tried to install on my external drive and erased everything on it. when i click the drive it says it needs to be formatted...... anyway to fix this or did i just lose everything on my external drive?

and why would a reinstall go for an external drive and not either of my internal drives?

If it tried to install windows on it (external), you most likely lost what was there. Best bet is to disconnect external and then install. x86 means its 32 bit, which version of windows are you installing?

xp, i was able to get my stuff back on the external drive using PTDD.

Hi PearlJamaholic

Glad to to hear that you were able to save the data. On any XP install, you always want everything disconnected, printers, scanners and slave drives. I would suspect that your USB drive was a bootable system at one time and if the bios has boot from USB as the first item, that is the one that XP will pick.

You could be facing many different problems here. If you are trying to install XP on a Vista drive, it will error out saying the CD is bad.--It isn't, you have to formate the drive and get rid of some Vista security files.

If you have a Dell with IDE cables, then everything is setup as cable select. This too can be a real pain. The boot drive is determined by a square hole punched in the IDE cable. The closest connector to the one plugged into the MB is the Master.

The other reason you would disconnect other drives, is that when XP boots up, if the other drive was bootable, it won't be anymore.

What I would recomend is to boot up with a dos boot disk and fdisk the drive and format it for a minute or two, and then try the install.