I have a friend/co-worker who has a DELL 310 where the main C drive has failed on her. She also has an extra 160GB SATA drive that contains all her music and photos. She got a new SATA drive (250GB) and is in the process of installing it now and putting XP back on. I really only have experience with installing EIDE drives and not SATA drives, but I thought it would be just a matter of plugging it in and installing XP. She wants to make sure she doesn't mess up the extra 160GB SATA drive cause it has all her photos and music on it. She has e-mailed me with the following concerning trying to install XP on the new drive: I have the XP disc running and it is asking me which partition to load XP on. 131070 MB disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi (MBR) Unpartitioned space of 131069 MB or 131070 MB disk 0 at Id 1 on bus 0 on atapi (MBR) Cartition1 (Data) (NTFS) 238473 MB (216434 MB free) I chose the larger one of 238473 MB as I'm assuming this is the new drive, but Windows says it cannot load on that choice because: "Setup must write some startup files to the following disk: 131070 MB disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi (MBR) However, this disk does not contain a Windows XP-compatible partition. To continue installing Windows XP, return to the partition selection screen and create a Windows XP-compatible partition on the disk above." I'm not familiar with this error message so I told her to first temporarily disconnect the 160GB drive so she doesn't accidently mess up the data on it. Anybody have any ideas on what this error message is referring to and how to correct it? Should she just followi its recommendations?
131070 MB disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi (MBR) Unpartitioned space of 131069 MB That is your new disk but just for caution, it is good to unplug the old disk when installing on a new one. It probably said that because the drive isn't formatted. Format it to NTFS from the boot cd.
