This is the follow-up I said I would make - the drive now loads Vista !!!
As I'm writing this it is booting into the desktop - for the first time. So
something in the old version of FDISK did the trick. Anyone else having a
similar problem with a SATA drive may want to try this. If you don't have
FDISK, you should be able to do a Google search and find plenty. Here's one
http://searchportal.information.com/...CxECal4FXAIMDA
Never used this site, can't vouch for the downloads.
Bob S.
"BobS" <no-> wrote in message
news:...
> This is just a follow-up as to what I did to get Vista/WinXP to load onto
> this Samsung hdd.
>
> Initial problem was I could not load any operating system on this drive
> but it tests fine, has been partitioned and formatted under WinXP Pro and
> Vista. I can use the drive as storage - works great. Drive was made a
> Basic drive - never dynamic. Whether the drive was installed by itself or
> with others, I could not load an operating system to it, nor Ghost an
> image and have it boot.
>
> Many things were tried and always the same result - blank screen, blinking
> cursor as though the MBR had been wiped. Talked to Samsung tech support
> and they had me run some more tests and I told them it passes their
> Hutil.exe program and that I even ran a low-level format on it - no
> failures on any of the tests and the configuration was correct. Lot's of
> head scratching by all but they finally said - we'll swap it out, go get
> an RMA. Ok, I do that but I want to try one more thing before I box this
> up and ship it back.
>
> Since one of the techs asked if I tried loading an old operating system
> like Win95 or 98SE it got me to thinking about something is different with
> the MBR and that I have seen this problem before. So I grabbed my old
> Win98 Boot disk floppy which has the old FDISK on it and booted up. Went
> into FDISK and deleted everything - then made a new partition.
>
> Put my WinXP Pro CD in and booted to it to start an install of WinXP
> (didn't work before). Much to my surprise - it now works.
>
> While I'm writing this from my laptop, the other system is now in the
> process of doing an image restore over the network of an old backup image.
> When I tried this before - it failed. I'll let you know in about 45 min
> if it works or not and then I will try doing clean installs of Vista and
> see what bubbles to the top.
>
> Now should anyone be thinking I'm running old hardware - nope. New last
> year Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe mb with all new WDC Raptor drives etc. - no
> legacy cards. Vista loads fine on all the other drives I've tried both
> 3Gb/1.5Gb transfer rate drives.
>
> Now - where I had seen this before was on a drive that had been
> partitioned with the software that comes with drives that overlays it own
> partition geometry. I can't think of the name of it but I know it's a
> real pain to get rid of it and that partitioning a drive from within
> Windows does not get rid of it - but the old FDISK does overwrite it. And
> that is what I think happened in this case, even though I never used the
> "factory provided" partitioning program, it cam from the factory that way.
> No amount of me using Vista or in XP's partitioning or formatting
> capabilities will get rid of it. As I recall (now) you needed their
> program to undue the partitioning if you didn't have the old version of
> FDISK.
>
> Well, my memory may not have all the details correct but I can definitely
> say that using a Win98 version of FDISK partitioned the drive so that now
> I can do a WinXP install. Will test a Vista load shortly.
>
> Maybe this will help someone else since there's been some problems by
> others about not being able to load Vista on to a SATA drive.
>
> Any questions and I'll try to answer them for you,
>
> Bob S.
>
>
>
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