XP on a Presario V6000

[Klytus]

I have a Compaq Persario V6000 CTO laptop (Intel Core Duo T2350; 1860 MHz; 2 GB RAM). It came pre-installed with Vista, but I had removed that and installed XP SP2. Now, about a year later, I need to re-install the OS, only this time, when I load my Windows XP CD's and I'm in the "Windows XP Professional Setup," screen, it gives me an error that it is NOT able to detect the hard drive, so the Setup cannot continue. This makes no sense, as the BIOS sees the hard drive, and Windows sees the hard drive. I restored it from the recovery disk, which was Vista, and I do NOT want to keep Vista on the system. Plus, this thing stays in Vista for about 1 minute and then self-rebots. I don't remember it being this much of PITA a year ago, but I'm stuck and want to put XP on this thing like I did before.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tmagic650]

The Vista boot loader is on the hard drive. You will have to format the drive before you can reinstall the operating system. If the hard drive is still undetected, replace the drive and install the OS

 

[Klytus]

The Vista boot loader is on the hard drive. You will have to format the drive before you can reinstall the operating system. If the hard drive is still undetected, replace the drive and install the OS

I'll give that try and let you know how it works.

Thanks

 

[Klytus]

The Vista boot loader is on the hard drive. You will have to format the drive before you can reinstall the operating system. If the hard drive is still undetected, replace the drive and install the OS

Crap. No matter how I re-format the drive, there's still 80 MB or so that remains hidden. If I can't use some of the tools I have at work to access and/or eliminate that, its time for a new hard drive.

 

[Klytus]

I pulled the hard drive out and completely reformatted it and redid the partitions with Partition magic. I then put it into a different laptop and was able to install XP. When I put the drive back into the original laptop, I get the bluescreen on a re-boot, even in Safe Mode. And when I try to re-re-install XP on that self-same laptop... I'm back to Square One: it can't finish because it fails to detect the hard drive.

Is this a setting in the laptop? Or is the Vista boot loader still hiding on the drive?

 

[Klytus]

Problem Solved

The Vista boot loader is on the hard drive. You will have to format the drive before you can reinstall the operating system. If the hard drive is still undetected, replace the drive and install the OS

It turns out the problem was in the BIOS: "SATA Native Support" was Enabled. Since Windows XP doesn't come with SATA drivers, once I Disabled it, it worked fine.