No hard disk drives installed on comp

[acefsj]

I have a dell inspiron 1525 laptop windows xp i am trying to reformat from a dell xp desktop disk when i get to the screen where it asks to press enter to setup xp or r to repair i press enter to setup xp and it say's (setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your comp) i went into bios looks like the hard drive is detected but does not work also tried resetting hard drive still nothing.

 

[Ultiweap]

Check if the HDD is well connected or that a cable may have been out by a shock and that the cable is in good condition. If not then the HDD may be dead.

 

[mailpup]

I'm going to guess that you have a SATA hard drive that isn't being recognized by Windows because it doesn't have the proper SATA controller drivers. If so, it is a common problem. One solution is to enter the BIOS and see if you can change the mode of the SATA controllers from SATA or AHCI to IDE. If so, Windows installation should then continue on.

If the BIOS does not allow this change, you might be able to install the needed drivers at the F6 prompt to install third party drivers in the beginning of Windows setup. However, this procedure requires a floppy drive. If you don't have one installed, you might be able to use an external USB floppy IF your BIOS supports it.

If not, you can make a slipstream CD which essentially is a copy of a normal Windows CD with the SATA drivers copied to the appropriate folder. With the drivers included on the CD, Windows installation should continue right through. Google for the procedure since there are several guides on how to make such a CD. Of course, you will have to use another PC to make the slipstream CD.

 

[acefsj]

Not to sure which drivers i would need i can't change to ide in the bios. Also you think i could install these drivers of a flash drive or external cd dvd drive

 

[mailpup]

When installing XP, no, not from a flash drive. If you have a slipstream CD, you can install Windows from an external CD drive if your BIOS allows booting from it. The F6 procedure only recognizes a floppy drive.

Go to the Dell website for any SATA drivers you need.

 

[acefsj]

actually it was vista i made a mistake i think it might have worked i put in my xp disk and it actually asked me to agree the terms never made it that far before but i want vista so i am going to try from my recovery partition again and see what happens

 

[acefsj]

Ya it did not work from the partition half way through just says error but i will try xp again and see what happens then i will try the slipstream idea let you know how it all works out

 

[acefsj]

never mind i had my flash drive in and it was trying to install on that.
Did not know you could do that what would the point of that be

 

[acefsj]

Hey that slipstream seemed to have worked it's formatting right now and i kept the vista recovery partition any thoughts on why it would not work thanks for your help cause xp is installing right now would like vista back on though bet you don't here that to much lol thanks again