No drives were found?

[Guest]

I have a gateway pentium 3 800 mhz 512 RAM computer with 2 hard drives (20 GB
with XP Pro and a 40 GB which is empty). The 40 GB drive is the one I want to
install vista on. However, when I boot from the DVD and have entered my
product key and I clicked custom setup, setup says that "No drives were
found. Click load driver to provide a mass storage device for installation."
These two drives, however, are generic volumes which installed automatically
in windows XP. I do not want to upgrade my windows xp pro as there isn't
enough space for vista on that drive. Do I need special drivers for using
even generic drives or is there a problem elsewhere?

 

[Jane C]

It's not the hard drives themselves that need drivers, it's the hard drive
controller. Are these IDE drives?

 

[Guest]

My two drives are:
Maxtor 4 D040H2 SCSI Disk Device
WDC WD20 SBA SCSI Disk Device

On the device manager it mentions IDE controllers. It lists:
Intel(r) 82371 AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
Primary IDE Channel
Secondary IDE Channel

I hope this helps.

 

[Jane C]

If you go to the Intel site, there is a Chipset Identification utility
available. Download the one for XP and run it to get the exact chipset on
the motherboard.
http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=861&lang=eng

I think your chipset is the Intel 810. As it's quite an old chipset, there
may not be any Vista-compatible drivers availalbe for it.

 

[Steve Urbach]

My two drives are:
Maxtor 4 D040H2 SCSI Disk Device
WDC WD20 SBA SCSI Disk Device

On the device manager it mentions IDE controllers. It lists:
Intel(r) 82371 AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
Primary IDE Channel
Secondary IDE Channel

When you started the Vista install, there was a chance to press F6
and specify additional (SCSI, RAID, SATA, *oddball*) disk drivers.
Did you do that?
You might try the repair option an Press F6 this time and supply the
needed driver. It *might* work for your problem.

 

[Guest]

I tried that intel chipset utility and it said that it failed to identify my
chipset. As for pressing F6 to add additional drivers, I never saw the prompt
for pressing F6 and I don't have the drivers for them anyway (otherwise I
wouldn't be posting here)

 

[Guest]

I found out that the chipset was a 440 one by using an older utility. I'm
guessing that there won't be any vista drivers for this one either (since I'm
guessing it's older)

 

[Jan Il]

Hi Peter

I have an old HP machine with 750 mhz AMD Duron processor, 512 MB of RAM and
3 hard drives (a WDC 40MB, WDC 80MB and Maxtor 200MB), and I have installed
every build since May this year on the 40MB drive. I have not had to update
or have any special drivers for the drive in order to install Vista. I had
at one point the same problem with the drive not being recognized.

Try going into the My Computer in XP, Manage>Disk Management, and check the
drive to be sure it, or the partition on it you want to install to, is
active. If not, then activate it. Give it a drive letter if it does not
have one. It won't matter, as Vista will insist on calling it C:\ once it
is installed anyway, or reformat it, but, not the quick format. The close
out and try the install again.

Also, be sure that you burned the download of Vista to a DVD as an ISO or
Image, not just burn it as a copy. Make sure your download is good. If not
sure, download a fresh copy and verify it is good by using the CRC Utility
as well (check information here
https://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=810249&SiteID=1)

Hope this helps.

Jan
MS MVP - Windows IE/OE [DTS/AumHa]
Data/Comp Technology
www.datacomptech.com
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