Installing Windows XP

[silverback]

A friend has a Vista system with which he's lost patience. As he has the Windows XP CD, he decided to install XP.
He bought a new hard disc drive, removed all the other disc drives from the 'Vista PC' then installed the new disc ie it is now the only disc drive in the PC. He ran the XP CD and it worked for bit (looked like it was installing drivers etc.) but then stopped and shut down saying it had a drive error.
By rebuilding the 'Vista PC' and installing the new disc into this system, he 'proved' that the new disc does work, can be formatted (NTFS) and files can be written/read from it - in the Vista world.

From this less than extensive description of the problem, can anyone deduce what might be causing the installation of XP to fail, please?

Thanks
Silverback

[StuartR]

One possibility is that the new disk needs a driver that is not part of the standard Windows XP installation. Can you get the exact model number of this disk drive?

[silverback]

Thanks Stuart.
It's an Hitachi HCS545050GLA380 500Gb disc.

Silverback

[Leif]

1] Is it possible the 'drive error' was caused by the CD/DVD drive - i.e. the XP installation disc has an error? Try copying the entire XP disc onto (say) the new drive and see if it is successful.

2] Having formatted the new drive under Vista, was a second attempt made to install XP?

3] With the (main) Vista drive and the new drive installed, can XP be installed from within Vista onto the new drive? (Possibly from the installed copy from 1] above.)
This may set the main boot sequence to be dual-boot, but as the ultimate aim is to not use the existing boot drive, this may not be a problem.

[StuartR]

...It's an Hitachi HCS545050GLA380 500Gb disc...

This appears to be an SATA drive, and the original version of Windows XP did not support SATA.

If you have another PC then you could create a slipstreamed installation disk that has Windows XP SP2, rather than the original Windows XP. Otherwise you will need to have a suitable SATA driver available on a floppy disk and type F6 during the installation when Windows asks if you need to install a driver for your system disk.