XP install

[visualman]

New hard drive fitted to sony fx21s. Trying to reinstall XP. The on screen messages appear in jumbled word order. Then asked to hit F3 to cancel install. Any thoughts?

[elsiegee40]

The new HDD formatted OK?

[visualman]

can it be formatted before there's an OS installed? I assumed it would format as the os was installed upon it.

[visualman]

Have looked again at this. The garbled on screen messages appear immediately the disc boots up. I think I may assume the XP disc is corrupted somehow

[glennda]

sounds like it cant find the hard disk, is it a sata hard disk? you might need to set the sata mode to native (or the other way around!) before it will find the hard disk.

[scholarpack]

surely unlikely xp is corrupt unless CD is physically scratched or something

[mac_shinobi]

sounds like it cant find the hard disk, is it a sata hard disk? you might need to set the sata mode to native (or the other way around!) before it will find the hard disk.

put it into IDE mode - also daft thing but ensure there are no marks / finger prints on the xp cd and yes you can do a format before installing, if you do a full format it will run a check on the hard drive to ensure no bad sectors etc ( If i remember correctly ) which will take about an hour or so