ok first let me say hello to all ... now im confused about this pc im trying to start to keep it short but to the piont blank hard drive (20 GB) winxp pro trying to install xp pro on drive was getting the blue screen of death now drive has been formated to fat now all i get is a screen with erorr message 1782 _disk controller failure with the two windows asking me if i want to boot F1 or F10 which is setup i go into setup make sure its booting from cd-rom cuz im trying to install but it dnt goes bak to the eroor wind on the boot screen please help

I would always use NTFS because of the 2GB addressing restriction on FAT.

So:

1/
FDISK the drive to a single volume NTFS 20GB

2/
Format the disk appropriately

3/
Reinstall XP from the CD

4/
Then report problems in detail

hey thanks for the advice will try and gewt to you and let you no what happen again thanks

i tried that butit a little deeper than just that you i get that blue screen saying that window had to shut down to protect my computer but the hhd is empty i dnt know what up

I'm not clear from your words what you mean. Did you do the FDISK to NTFS and Format the 20GB drive? Yes/No?

no i didnt i fat the drive

So, the first thing you must fnd a way of doing is to boot up from the CD in Command mode; run FDISK to make the disk NTFS with a single primary volume of 20GB; then Format the disk; reboot from the CD and begin installation.

OK - I got your PM. I prefer not to do this sort of thing through PM.

So you formatted to NTFS. It's interesting that all this worked without difficulty. That is right, isn't it?

So could you please be very specific about the steps you take when trying to install XP and exactly what error messages you see and what was displayed just before the error message?