Cannot find HDD When Reloading XP

[ppharper]

I have a Dell Inspiron 9100 that has a 100% clean HDD. Want to reload XP (do have the original Dell CD and drviers etc). When attempting to load XP, the "advice" is that XP cannot find any hard disk drives. The drive is present, and serviceable. The 'published' solution is to download a driver to a floppy disk and use that during the install process. However, my maching does not have an internal floppy disk.

Would welcome any suggestions how to solve the problem

Cheers

pph

 

[Tmagic650]

Is the "present" hard drive an IDE or SATA drive?

 

[ppharper]

The installed HDD is a Hitachi Travelstar ATA/IDE

 

[almcneil]

Does the BIOS POST detect the HDD on startup? If not, check your BIOS settings.

 

[ppharper]

My initial reply was "yes"; however thought I had better check and now the answer is "no". Not sure what has happened, but it does appear as though the drive has died. Even tried to re-sanitise using WipeDisk (the program that cleaned the disk in the first place). Alas, the disk is not even recognised by that. Will have access to other identical laptop latter in the week so will try swapping drives between machines.

Thanks for your repsonses.

Pete H

 

[almcneil]

It can happen that a brand new HDD is defective. Just happened to a friend of mine last week.

It could also be that you didn't connect it properly. That's happened to me! Or you didn't set it up as the Master drive in BIOS.