T20 Windows XP Install Probs

[mattis]

Ive done a search and have trawled through several forums but nothing seems to have any info on my problem.

Ok so I am currently running centos on my T20 (512Mb of Ram, 700Mhz). Im wanting to whack a windows XP install on it but after booting off the CD it gets to "Windows is inspecting your system" and then I get a blank screen and the hdd light stays lit solidly (no activity from the CD either), the installation does not progress any further.

I have upgraded the bios to v 1.22 (latest) but this has not helped.

Ive tried SP1 and SP2 XP versions as well as home and pro copies.

Am I missing anything here or is there somewhat of a hardware conflict, I can see others have win XP installed on a T20 so it must be do-able.

Ive seen the IBM article on needing to have the supplements installed, http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-40062, but all the installation instructions for these seem to indicate you need to have XP or at least windows installed already?

Any help would be muchly appreciated.

[GomJabbar]

One trick is to remove extra RAM, and disable cache RAM or shadow RAM in the BIOS (probably not an option on the T20). Sometimes flakey RAM or the cache can stall an installation. If you take them out of the system then the install goes OK. After the install, put them back in service.

You may have to repartition and reformat the hard drive. You can do this from the command prompt with fdisk and format. If you have a Windows Upgrade CD, it will look for an existing version of Windows installed, and will not install if it doesn't find it. I have read that when it looks for the existing Windows installation, you can insert a previous Windows CD disk in the drive and the Upgrade CD will accept that. I have not tried this method personally however.

[LtTPfan]

I have read that when it looks for the existing Windows installation, you can insert a previous Windows CD disk in the drive and the Upgrade CD will accept that. I have not tried this method personally however.

Yup, that works.

[tfflivemb2]

I ran into this problem on a 600E that I had previously had Red Hat FC 4 on. I had to insert my Windows 98SE CD and reformat the entire hard drive before the installation of XP would start. It seems that for some reason the XP CD was having a hard time reading the non-dos formatted hard drive.

[mattis]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

One trick is to remove extra RAM, and disable cache RAM or shadow RAM in the BIOS (probably not an option on the T20). Sometimes flakey RAM or the cache can stall an installation. If you take them out of the system then the install goes OK. After the install, put them back in service.

You may have to repartition and reformat the hard drive. .

I have tried it with the original 128Mb stick and with a single 256Mb stick and both do the same.

Im wondering if it is something with the nix partition, I might run fdisk over it and reformat.

[mattis]

ok, so I ran a win98 boot disk over it, wiped the nix partition, recreated a new primary DOS one and formatted this.

Doesnt seem to have helped though

Im thinking its hardware but goodness knows what, the thing is stock besides the RAM upgrade and I have even removed that and run it with the stock RAM.

I might have a go at installing windows98 and then upgrading that, unless anyone else has some more suggestions?

[mattis]

ok, finally got it all sorted, I installed windows 98se and then straight away ran the xp install from the desktop, this worked fine for me and winxp is runnin on the T20 absolutely fine.

Everything I was reading about this was saying either a partition windows couldnt recognise or dodgy ram was the problem, still not sure what caused it.