XP Pro Install Problem

I'm having a really hard time re-installing XP Pro on a new system. It came with XP Pro installed, and then the MBR was corrupted, and couldn't be recovered, so I'm trying to do a repair installation.

I set the first boot device to CD in the BIOS (Sidenote: DVD is master on secondary IDE channel, CDRW is slave). The system boots off of the CD fine (in the DVD drive), and begins the XP install. Then the system restarts, and goes to the XP startup screen. It then tells me that it can't find the file SNMS, and to tell it where it is. It only gives me the option of the A:\ and D:\ drives.

When I tell it the D:\ drive, I get nothing. The drive doesn't spin up and seek, or anything. However, when I tell it A:\, it spins the A:\ drive looking for the files.

What's going on? Can anyone steer me in the right direction?

 

Try swapping the dvd and cdrw and seeing if that makes a difference.


The only thing I can think of is that at first it recognizes the dvd drive as a cdrom, but after it goes into the next step, it id's it as a dvd and then hangs because the proper drivers are not installed yet for the dvd. Not certain about that, but that is what it sounds like to me.

 

Thanks. I'll give it a shot, and post results.

 

I got it to work, but ended up getting another boot error. Apparently XP has an issue with ATA66 drives that are connected with 40 pin cable instead of 80. So, I'll upgrade to 80 and see what happens.