formatting SSD drive under Windows XP

[niggles]

First, thanks for at least reading this, hopefully someone here might have some idea on what to do on this. I have my PC running windows 7. This is actually Win 7 upgrade so I have to install my old Windows XP in order to use the Win 7 disk. I got a new Solid state drive and am trying to format it under win 7 but keep getting blue screened with 'PCI.SYS errors" which are unrecognized hardware. Obviously this is the SSD. I tried plugging the SSD in as simply a secondary drive but it can't be seen to be formatted either. Does anyone have any idea how to format this thing so I can start installing xp and then the win7 upgrade?

Thanks again

 

[VirtualLarry]

PCI.SYS has nothing to do with the SSD. Look elsewhere for your problem. SSDs are standard SATA devices. They don't plug in to the PCI or PCI-E busses directly.

(Unless you have a RevoDrive or something?)

 

[Nothinman]

And unrecognized hardware shouldn't cause a STOP error anyway, if you're seeing that then I'd say something else is up.

But you can do the normal Vista/Win7 install without a key then upgrade from that workaround to avoid using XP at all.

 

[stahlhart]

First, thanks for at least reading this, hopefully someone here might have some idea on what to do on this. I have my PC running windows 7. This is actually Win 7 upgrade so I have to install my old Windows XP in order to use the Win 7 disk. I got a new Solid state drive and am trying to format it under win 7 but keep getting blue screened with 'PCI.SYS errors" which are unrecognized hardware. Obviously this is the SSD. I tried plugging the SSD in as simply a secondary drive but it can't be seen to be formatted either. Does anyone have any idea how to format this thing so I can start installing xp and then the win7 upgrade?

Thanks again

Since you've already got a working Windows 7 installation, couldn't you go with something like Acronis and image it over to the SSD, rather than rebuild everything from scratch? Seems like that would be a lot easier.

You'd just need a third drive in the picture to store the intermediate image if you wanted to avoid backing up to physical media (which, based on recent personal experience, I think you would :whiste.

 

[kmmatney]

Since you've already got a working Windows 7 installation, couldn't you go with something like Acronis and image it over to the SSD, rather than rebuild everything from scratch? Seems like that would be a lot easier.

You'd just need a third drive in the picture to store the intermediate image if you wanted to avoid backing up to physical media (which, based on recent personal experience, I think you would :whiste.

yep - that is the easiest way. Try installing to a regular hard drive, then clone it to the SSD. Since it Xp, it won't be aligned, to use GParted and place a 1 MiB space before the partition to align it (verify with AS-SSD). Then install win 7. If you can avoid installing Windows XP altogether, that's the way to go, but its easy to clone to an SSD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, do a fresh install of Win7 onto the SSD, using the double-install trick to install the upgrade as a full version. Completely legal if you also already have XP.

 

[niggles]

First, thanks all very much for the great ideas.

Yeah, do a fresh install of Win7 onto the SSD, using the double-install trick to install the upgrade as a full version. Completely legal if you also already have XP.

OK, I'll give that a go, didn't think I could do that, but I'll see how it goes. Not sure what the 'double install trick' is, could you expand on that? or are you talking about imaging this thing? I'm thinking what is being said here is that I format the drive with just the win7 upgrade disk then install xp and then win 7 onto another drive, then make an image and install that image onto the SSD. Trouble with the current image is that it's fracked so I'm really not going to do that. on the pci.sys message, I'm not sure what else it could be. Keep in mind that my copy of Win xp is pre service pack 1. I would think it's compatible with very little of anything these days. I have zero issue installing xp onto a regular SATA drive on this current hardware config. The only thing different is the SATA drive.

Love coming here, people are pretty damn helpful.

 

[niggles]

ok, found the double install directions and followed that... Sad thing is that it says that the installation of windows is newer than what I'm trying to instal from... so I think I have to go back and do it all over again... yaaay trial and error.

 

[bacillus]

Can you not boot from the upgrade dvd?

 

[niggles]

yes, I can boot from the upgrade DVD, simply select full install and don't enter a serial number. The only thing I did that was different than the directions I found was to *not* install all the updates before doing the second install that is the upgrade install that you put the serial number in with. The issue was that the upgrade disk doesn't want to be older than the current version that you're upgrading from.

 

[niggles]

PCI.SYS has nothing to do with the SSD. Look elsewhere for your problem. SSDs are standard SATA devices. They don't plug in to the PCI or PCI-E busses directly.

(Unless you have a RevoDrive or something?)

and thanks for your input, but actually it *was* the SSD that was the problem, XP will boot with everything *except* the SSD, with the SSD that was the only times I'd get that error.