Weird Windows XP Setup problem

[richardm]

It's the newer motherboards that have the automatic HD discovery that usually have low-level formatting options in BIOS as well. The older ones required using the accompanying floppy with the disk-controller diags, etc (i.e. REAL old).

I first saw it in the first PC I made, which had a 25MHz 386 SX processor. That motherboard had a low-level format option for the hard disk, and that was in about 1990, I suppose. Selecting the option gave you a fine raft of dire warnings!

 

[Zep]

Originally posted by richardm I first saw it in the first PC I made, which had a 25MHz 386 SX processor. That motherboard had a low-level format option for the hard disk, and that was in about 1990, I suppose. Selecting the option gave you a fine raft of dire warnings!

Not too many years before that, I had to deal with the 8086 and 80286-based stuff, where the disk controller was a separate ISA board, usually from Western Digital (the HD kit was an add-on in those days!). You needed to run the diags off the floppy to "boot" the controller, and it would let you run another diag from the floppy that was a low-level disk formatter. Lose that floppy and you were in serious trouble! And it took FOREVER to format disks too - I vaguely recall a new 20MB (that's twenty megabyte) drive on a PC/XT taking about 5 hours to format - tic...tic...tic...

Yes, it was a good thing that they integrated the disk controllers into the motherboards (but a pity they went for IDE and not SCSI, though) and thus could put all the HD management stuff in BIOS.

 

[Janus]

The original complaint has been solved but I will add the following in case it clarifies anything.

The windows XP CD bootloader checks the first hard disk on the system for bootable partitions. If a bootable partition is found then the loader prompts the user with words to the effect of "Press any key to boot from the CD-ROM....". Naturally, the loader will only boot the setup program if the user presses the key during a time delay. Otherwise it will boot the first bootable partition on the hard disk.

The user may not see this message if their monitor is unusually slow to resync after the video reset that often occurs just prior to the boot process.

Yes, it was a good thing that they integrated the disk controllers into the motherboards (but a pity they went for IDE and not SCSI, though) and thus could put all the HD management stuff in BIOS.

Actually there is a BIOS ROM on most (but not all) external controller cards, even old MFM cards. They would not be bootable without a BIOS. UI features were left out to save space. Features such as low level format were accessed by loading the debug utility and calling the correct address.
Today, even the cheapest card can afford to insert its own ui into the boot process.

 

[Zep]

Actually there is a BIOS ROM on most (but not all) external controller cards, even old MFM cards. They would not be bootable without a BIOS. UI features were left out to save space. Features such as low level format were accessed by loading the debug utility and calling the correct address.
Today, even the cheapest card can afford to insert its own UI into the boot process.

Spot on!

And MFM drives were used in non-PC machines as well (the DEC MicroVAX II, for instance), requiring another set of diags specific to that hardware to do the disk management. For the MV2, incidentally, these diags came either on quad-density single-sided 5.25in floppies (true!) or a 95MB DLT tape (the TK50), and were proprietary to DEC. Further, the format for an MV2 MFM disk was not the same as that for a PC, so they could not be interchanged without being reformatted (been there, done that, got the tattoos).

Like I said, SCSI would have been a FAR better choice initially, but such is life.