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Installing Windows XP
Windows XP Installation Guide - Phase 1
Serial-ATA
If you are installing to a Serial-ATA Hard Disk then you
will need a floppy disk containing the appropriate
Serial-ATA drivers for your motherboard.
Quality motherboard manufacturers will supply a floppy disk
with the motherboard for this purpose but, in some cases, it
will be necessary to create a Serial-ATA driver disk using
the CD that is packaged with the motherboard, or even
download the drivers from the manufacturer's web site.
The procedure for installing
Windows XP
onto a new PC is as follows:
Switch on the PC and put the
Windows XP
CD into the CD-ROM. Press the reset button on the PC and
allow it to boot.
The PC should boot to the CD-ROM, if not check your
motherboard manual to enable 'Boot to CD-ROM' in its BIOS
settings.
Serial-ATA
If you are installing to a Serial-ATA hard disk then keep an
eye out for the message (It only appears very briefly):
Press F6 if you
need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver...
Tap the [F6] key a few times. The installation will
continue, but will stop in a few moments to give you the
opportunity to insert a floppy disk with the Serial-ATA
drivers on.
After a few seconds a blue
Windows Setup
screen will appear.
The system will load some basic files to enable it to begin
the install
At the Welcome to
Setup screen, press
ENTER to
continue.
The system will check the HDD to determine if / how it is
configured
Serial-ATA
If you are installing to a Serial-ATA Hard Disk then Windows
will require the Serial-ATA drivers at this point. A message
will appear as follows:
Setup could not
determine the type of one or more mass storage devices
installed in your system, or you have chosen to manually
specify an adapter...
Insert your Serial-ATA drivers floppy disk and press [S].
If a list of drivers appears, select the correct driver (the
motherboard manual should help you with this choice.)
Windows XP
should load the appropriate driver and continue to install.
At the Windows XP
license agreement screen, read the agreement
and press the F8
key to continue.
It will be necessary to agree to continue the installation
Highlight
Unpartitioned space and press
ENTER
The system will 'Partition' the hard disk to enable it to be
formatted
Select one of the Formatting options and press
ENTER
FAT would be the most common option for home users. If you
are confident with operating systems you can select any of
the options available. If you select NTFS, note that other
operating systems may not be able to access the files
created on this drive.
To confirm that you wish to format the HDD, press
ENTER
Setup will format the HDD and check it for errors. This may
take some time depending on the capacity of the HDD
Once formatted, Setup will copy its files to the HDD.
This make take a few moments depending on the speed of your
system
Setup will reboot the PC after a 15 second countdown (or
press ENTER
to reboot quicker)
During the reboot, remove the
Windows XP
CD from the CD-ROM Drive. The CD is removed to force the
system to boot to the HDD. If this produces an error,
configure the BIOS settings to boot to the HDD first
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