If you have tears to shed,...

[Warp_Core]

Talking about XP install horror stories, here is a real Oscar nominee... A friend of mine has two drives in his 3-year old K6-2 350 machine: an IBM Deskstar 20GB and a Quantum Fireball 2GB. The IBM had ME on it, the Quantum was blank. He decided to take the plunge and go out and get XP Pro, and he asked me to help him out with the install. First off, he just wanted to install, so we put the ROM in, booted from it, XP looked the drives over, etc. I asked him, my finger poised over the button, if he was sure he'd backed up everything he'd need, just in case... Oh, he said, that's a point. No worry, say I, we haven't done anything yet, we'll stop here, you can pull out your stuff, etc- then we noticed that XP was showing both drives as 2GB. Came out of Setup- and the IBM is inaccessible. No longer valid. Everything gone. My suspect- corrupted Partition Table. Suffice to say, fdisking and reformatting was involved, XP Setup refused to recognise the IBM as anything other than a 2GB partition, and my friend ended up with a fresh copy of ME minus his e-mail, game-saves, etc (which, admittedly, I thought he had already backed up). So we tried the upgrade from inside ME- STOP: unmountable_boot_volume. And yes, we turned off UltraDMA, shadowing, cache, etc etc. Admittedly, his machine may be considered borderline (although XP didn't complain about anything except, yes, you guessed it, the modem) but I thought the worst that could happen would be it wouldn't install. Not that it would nuke his drive.

[tha 4NiK8R]

That sux. I have installed XP close to 30 times now and have not had a single issue. Mostly clone POS PC's too. Sounds like you just had some bad luck.

[Warp_Core]

Well, yeah- it went on my KT7A-R without a hitch. Put the disk in, 40 minutes later there you are, so I personally can't complain at all about the installation routine.

[techs]

Whenever possible I remove the secondary drive if it has any data on it before I install XP. During my beta testing I noticed that the volume manager can sometimes do just what happened to you.. corrupt the fat on the drive with data.