I am posting this same question as i posted to WD support in the hope that someone maybe will knwo the answer in the community or if someone faced a similar problem and knows the solution:
Hello, My brother and I have been trying to install/move windows XP to new WD Caviar Green 750GB disk for the whole week now. At first we cloned the previous old drive to new one. It went fine, but system (windows XP) wouldn’t boot no matter what.
Then we tried a fresh install (the windows install disk is SP2 edition). We divided the disk into two partitions, one to be used for system (200GB) and other one for data (the rest of disk space). It went fine, windows installed, so we started adding a few basic drivers (motherboard) and installed security updates. System was then shut down, but after turning it back on (the next day) the system no longer booted but instead made a continuous boot loop. Today we made a quick format of system partition and reinstalled windows. Again it all went fine. We installed motherboard drivers first and rebooted. System failed to boot. The message displayed was a general error (searched the web for it).
Using last good known point in system we then managed to boot the OS and decided to now first install GPU drivers. But first we needed to download the latest ones from the internet. During driver download (download was about 70% completed) system suddenly reboot itself and could then not boot into Windows.
We decided to use Linux LiveCD to boot up and maybe see what is happening and possibly run a “testdisk”. Linux immediately recognised some disk errors when trying to mount it and repaired them. We didn’t do anything but reboot after that.
This time system booted up and first thing we did was to align partitions using Acronis utility. We then installed SP3 from a CD. Then we proceeded to install windowsXP critical security patches. ATI GPU driver required frame .net to be installed, so we installed latest version 4. However, the driver (ATI catalyst) couldn’t work with it so we installed version 3.5 instead. So far, so good, despite numerous reboots as required by windows or drivers. We then applied a few more security patches and system required a reboot. Again the reboot failed. This time only safe mode with no networking is available. Check disk (CHKDSK) doesn’t show up any disk errors.
Now this all smells like a hardware error. Is it possible that the drive is faulty? And if so how could we verify that? Is there some step we overlooked? WindowsXP still can boot normally from the old hard drive (IDE Fujitsu 10 GB).
Serial: [Deleted]
Model: WD Caviar Green 750 GB
I would really appreciate any help or even a hint as i feel we have exhausted all options to troubleshoot the problem.
