Hi All,
This is not really a question,I managed to solve the problem, just wanted to let everyone know in case someone else bumps into the same issue…
I am selling my HP DV8000 laptop, so I wiped my 100 Gig HD clean with Darik’s boot & nuke disk (short DoD method). Everything went fine then I wanted to do a fresh install of XP home. When the install reached the partitioning or format phase XP would simply shut down. After trying it a zillion times, sometimes it would start copying files, but never went further – just shutdown. I’ve tried everything, BIOS parameters, formatting with a different utility etc. to no avail. I thought about hardware issues, but I was able to do a clean Linux or Vista install on the disk. I also tried Xp professional, same issue. But I wanted to put XP home which came with the lappy (remember I am selling it).
Solution:
I had another of the same HDs, which I did not sell and therefore have not wiped clean, but used as removable drive with a USB enclosure. So I backed up that disk, and replaced the wiped HD with it. Repartition, reformat with the XP install disk, and did a clean install without any problems whatsoever… The other (wiped)HD works just fine as a USB disk… So I do not know about other wiping utils, but Darik’s boot & nuke definitely runs into an XP bug while installing XP on a nuked HD, while it is fine with Linux or Vista…
Hope this helps somebody, somewhere…
Viktor
