XP installation looping; corrupting bootsector

I was recently given 2 Toshiba Satellite A305-s6905 laptops to install XP Pro on. They were currently running Vista, and worked fine.

After downloading the drivers from Toshibas site, I went ahead with the format and install on the first machine. Once I set the hard drive to compatability mode (instead of ahci) the install went perfectly, and installing the drivers and software caused no problems.

Now I am in the process of downgrading to XP Pro on the second toshiba, but running into several problems. First the laptop started with 3 partitions. The C drive, along with a restore partition, and another that I did not recognize, yet when running through the windows install it only shows the main C partition. The previous Toshiba showed all 3.

If you select the C drive and continue the set up, everything works fine until the computer restarts. It continues to boot to the cd, and thus restarting the installation. I have tried using the boot menue to boot to the HD, and taking the disk out on reboot, but it refuses to cooperate.

My first thought was that the install had placed a bad boot.ini causing it to want to read from the disk on every boot, so I put in a copy of partition magic that I found around the office, thinking I would boot to that and do a good clean format of the drive and make sure there weren't any hidden/missing partitions.

However, trying to boot to anything other than the XP installation disk proved to be fruitless, as the Toshiba will run straight to a LAN boot and result in a PXE error, because well, I dont have it set up to boot from lan. This shows me that it isn't reading the optical drive, or the hard drive for whatever reason.

So I loaded up the XP install disk again, and instead of runnin setup, I open the repair console.

Running chkdsk says it has unrecoveral problems.

running fixboot says that the bootsector is corrupt.

I formatted the partition from there, and check again in the recovery console.

Chckdsk reads just fine, and fixboot finds no problem.

Seeing that it now has no problems with the hard drive, I go on my merry way and attempt to run the setup again... *duh duh duh*
only to have it continue its looop

Loading up the recovery console shows that again, after running setup the hd has problems and the bootsector is corrupted.

I have used this disk 2 already for installs, so I know its a good copy, but other than that, I feel like I dont know much right now.

If you have any advice, I will be glad to listen to it, and if there is any information you need I will be happy to provide it.

Thank you
Joseph W.

 

Could the hard drive be getting tired? How old is it?

You could boot up off a Linux Live CD or BartPE and use a tool to check the S.M.A.R.T. information of the drive if it has it?
You may need to enable S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS

 

I'd move the troublesome hd into the computer on which you've successfully installed XP and see how it acts there. That would give you an idea if it is a prblem with the hd or a problem with some other hardware on the troublesome Toshiba.

I had two Dell notebooks that were the same model but the hardware in them was not exactly the same. You could be facing the same thing with the Toshibas.

 

I actually just burned a new copy of Ubuntu for another project, so on Monday I'll take another crack at the machine when I get access to it again, and make sure the HD is up to par. Thanks for the input thus far guys