Hi,

I started to have problems when installing windows xp. Its a seagate 300Gbyte hard drive (IDE). I get to the formatting stage, which I choose ntfs, after getting to the reboot stage, it reboots, then I get the error: "A disk error occurred - ctrl alt del to reboot". The only way I got round this was to partition the hard drive and format 30 Gig to FAT32, the rest ntfs, then install windows xp on FAT32 - yes it worked fine. I then merged the partitions to one all ntfs - and yes it still worked until microsoft did one of its updates, then back to "disk read error". So I repeated everything but left the 2 partitions 30 Gig for win XP and the rest as ntfs - and everything worked fine. I have just wiped this clean because I need to use windows 2003 server - but I get no option to format in FAT32, so I did the whole thing and assumed that this problem would not happen with 2003, but it did - "a disk read error occurred". I know microsoft have admitted to a bug like this when installing windows 2000, but can't find the thread any more. Anyone got any ideas