Greetings:

Any help would be most appreciated and most welcome. Machine I'm having a problem with:

Sony Viao
p3 866
Nvidia 128 MB graphics card (Ti4400)
Sound blaster Z gaming sound card
512 mb ram

yes, it's a very old machine which I gave to my young daughter for school and internet.

Ok, I installed a new IDE 320 GB hard drive. I booted from my windows xp disk and it seems to have formatted the disk without incident. After the format was complete and some files were installed the system tried to restart to complete the install. The screen read:

No Emulation
a disk error has occured
press ctrl-alt- delete to reboot.

This is the only hard drive I'm using and I've placed the jumper in a few different spots as recommended from the trouble shooting portion of the manual.

Thank you so much for any help offered.Welcome to the CH forums.

I haven't come across a definite answer but I suspect that a 320Gb hard drive is not supported. Would need to know the model number\mobo ID to dig further.

Thank you.

I can find three stickers on the mother board. They read:

00E0 18C 569 6B

1761375xx 0020443*

MS 1091440-M6PF20-B06-02975

The Hard drive being detected by the BIOS is:

WDC WD3200AAJB-00WGA0

The drive I removed was a Maxtor 40 GB ATA/66 drive and the excact modle of my computer is a Sony Vaio PCV-RX270DS.

Oh, I read somewhere where it was asked what what type of XP disk am I trying to install from. The disk has those colorful holograms on it if this is important.

Really, thanks so much for your time.

SteveThanks for the info. The USER and tech specs manuals I found for that model only give the hard drive size as 40Gb and don't state the maximum supported. Could you PARTITION/format the drive to give just one active partition of 40GB then reinstall the OS on that partition? No guarantees it will work and seems a waste of a decent sized hdd but it may allow a workaround.

Another option is, of course, to get out there and try to source an old hard drive 40Gb or less.

Nothing I tried worked so reinstalled my old 40GB drive and reformatted and did a clean install of windows. Everything went as smooth as can be. You're right, I guess this new drive is not compatible. I'll have to try and locate a 40GB drive to use as a second drive. What a waste of money and time that was.

Live and learn. I didn't think the actual size of a drive made a difference as long as the connection's were compatible.

Thank you,

SteveYou probably just need to set the drive up right in the BIOS. Did you do this first?
have you attempted to use the "cylinder reduction jumper" as stated in the manual? Unfortunately this will only allow you to use less then 40GB of SPACE, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Also- for some reason with my old computer; I found that the secondary IDE channel properly detected and could use a 160GB drive right off the bat, while using that same drive on the primary channel froze the computer at the detection stage.Dias:

Yes and thank you. I made sure the drive was selected and detected in the BIOS before anything.

BC:

I thought of that as well. I tried using the spare power plug and the secondary cable but had the same results. I know it sounds like I was ready to pull my hair out of my head, but I actually find this to be very relaxing and interesting.


And have to say; what a fantastic site. I've already spent hours reading different threads and learning as much as possible.If you can settle down to read this site you might want to give the workarounds a go. Suggest lotsa java on hand