Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed

[Guest]

My daughter installed a new EIDE hard drive in her computer. It was FDISKED
and formated using a Win98 Boot disk. The Bios was set with CDROM, HDD-0,
Floopy. Then she put the WindowsXP Home Edition CD OEM in the DVD and ran
Setup -- it went the to point of "Welcome to setup"; then my daughter
pressed Enter to begin the installation of Windows and what she got was
"Setup did not find any hard disk drive in your computer. Setup cannot
continue." or something to this effect. She changed to a different new hard
drive of the same brand, and got the same message. She even reset the Bios
and that did not help.
I have spent the last two days on the phone with her trying to help her with
this problem and have not been able to find a solution. I did do a search
through the various posting and found some similar problems, but related to
RAID or other types of drives.
Does any one have any idea of how to fix this problem??

~ Paul
aka karel3

 

[Guest]

First off make sure the BIOS POST detect the harddrive correctly.
And you don't have to FDISK the harddrive with Win98 bootdisk. WinXP setup
will let you create partition on it once it found the harddrive.
Is the harddrive attached on an add-on IDE card? If this is so, u have to
press F6 when prompted during the inital part of setup to provide appropriate
driver for windows setup to access drives on the add-on card.

Nigel

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

My daughter installed a new EIDE hard drive in her computer. It was FDISKED
and formated using a Win98 Boot disk. The Bios was set with CDROM, HDD-0,
Floopy. Then she put the WindowsXP Home Edition CD OEM in the DVD and ran
Setup -- it went the to point of "Welcome to setup"; then my daughter
pressed Enter to begin the installation of Windows and what she got was
"Setup did not find any hard disk drive in your computer. Setup cannot
continue." or something to this effect. She changed to a different new hard
drive of the same brand, and got the same message. She even reset the Bios
and that did not help.
I have spent the last two days on the phone with her trying to help her with
this problem and have not been able to find a solution. I did do a search
through the various posting and found some similar problems, but related to
RAID or other types of drives.
Does any one have any idea of how to fix this problem??

~ Paul
aka karel3

The first step in this situation is to check if the BIOS detects the
disk.
a) When launching the BIOS setup, does it show the disk?
b) When booting normally (and without any CD!), she can
see a number of messages on the screen. One of them shows
all disk devices (hard disk, CD ROM, Zip drive etc.). Can
she see the hard disk?

All this is independent of any partitioning or formatting. There
is no need to do this with a Win98 boot disk anyway - the
WinXP setup process will do it for her.

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Karel

The jumpers on the drive should be checked to ensure that they are in the
correct position..