WinXP hard disk problems

[Gamer65]

Well, after deleting the wrong partition (which happened to be my other hard drive, which had to be the one with all my files backed up) after formatting my hard drive, i now cannot even install Windows. I did this trying to re-install windows xp, and now when i try to install it to the newly formatted NFTS hard drive (not quick format, the one that takes an hour) it copies all the files, reboots, and gives me a "A disk read error has occurred. Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to reboot"

I've googled this a lot, but haven't found anything having to do with win xp setup. nothing was wrong before i did this.
can anyone help me out? i really need to get to installng win xp for work!! thanks.

[skiuba]

happy new year,

have you checked the bios to see if it is booting to the hard drive that you want and not the cd-rom . is there another partition?
is it a pata or sata drive? verify what its booting too if you havent done this already

just things that come to mind

[Gamer65]

Yes, I've actually manually selected the HD every time the installation reboots. There was a PATA drive, but i took it out. it's on a SATA drive. around 50 gigs is partitioned....i'm going to try to get whatever i can off of that drive, becuase all of my other important info got deleted. Let me guess I have to delete that partition too? oh man.... It's a sata drive, though.

[Gamer65]

and happy new year to you too!

[Gamer65]

please, if anyone could help me out. i'd love to start installin this!

[Train]

SATA, did you do the F6 and feed the SATA drivers when it asked for SCSI drivers [ which windows sees SATA as being].

[Train]

And seeing you have XP, I hope you have a floppy drive so you can do it.

[Gamer65]

Just did, and it doesn't see my drive."setup was unable to load support for the mass storage device you specified" then it says it'll load support for the following <none>. and I don't have a disk for a sata drive...argh what to do.

EDIT: bios see's the drive.


EDIT 2: I just tried again and now it's saying "Setup cannot determine the type of computer you have..." then it asks me to choose between "Standard pc with c-step i486" or "other"