Windows XP cannot detect hard drive

[DocNoc]

Hi all, well... I just bought a new Seagate 500gb hd, hooked it up and figured it was time to format with windows xp home....wrong. I get to the setup screen and it says that windows xp cannot detect a hard drive. I have created 2 different floppy with 2 different sets of drivers. One from my mobo's CD and another from a tech support person from the place where I purchased my pc from. The two that I have tried were SIL3132 Base Controller Driver and nVidia nForce 32bit SATA RAID Driver and it still gives me the no hard drive can be detected error. If anybody out there could help me out and please help me find what I need to do it would be greatly appreciated as it will cost me about 130 bucks to get it done where I bought my computer at and that is 130 dollars I cant afford.

I have an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Mother Board and the hd that I bought is a
Seagate ST3500418AS 500GB SATA2 7200rpm 16MB Hard Drive.

If anybody could plz help I have been going at this for about a week now and I am going out of my head. Thanks in advance.

 

[snowchick7669]

You may need to initialize the Hard drive.

To do this, hook the new drive up as a slave and boot into windows.

Go into Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.

You should see the 500Gb sitting there as unallocated space

Right click on the drive and select to format it, just do a quick format.

Then see if it is being detected, hope this helps

 

[DocNoc]

unfortunately I dont think that is an option as my other HD was fried with a power surge that went through my area. The only working HD that I have is the new one so I am stuck in a bit of a conundrum here, any other options?

 

[snowchick7669]

Have you enabled the SATA support in the BIOS?

 

[mailpup]

Is this the new hard drive the only one in your PC? Is SATA enabled in the BIOS?

 

[DocNoc]

My Bios show SATA 1 - SATA 4 but it is my understanding that the HD is supposed to be in SATA 0. Also it is the only HD in my machine.

 

[mailpup]

When installing XP, are you pressing F6 to install the SATA drivers during Windows Setup?

It really doesn't make much difference which SATA connector your hard drive is plugged into. It should still work.

 

[DocNoc]

Yes, I have tried the f6 floppy install with two different drivers. Selected the option on each that pertained to my system and neither worked. The drivers I have tried are stated in my first post.

 

[mailpup]

As you may know, your motherboard has two different manufacturer's SATA controllers. When you tried the SIL3132 drivers, you plugged the hard drive into one of the SIL controllers correct?

If you haven't already, try going to the Asus website and downloading the appropriate SATA driver from there.