W-XP Professional (Dell OEM):"Setup did not find any hard disk dri

[Guest]

When trying to wipe out my existing Dell OEM XP Home Edition SP2
installation, followed by staging Dell OEM XP Professional from scratch, I
keep getting the following error message at the beginning of Windows Setup
(trying to boot from CD): "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed
on your computer". That's weird because obviously there is a c: drive running
the current installation with XP Home Edition.

 

[Guest]

OK, found out how to read the manual - solved

 

[Guest]

I have the same problem. How did you resolve it? (I do not have a floppy
drive, and one technote I saw required it.)

 

[Guest]

The following thread explains it:

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_harddrive&message.id=78270

As far as I remember, a floppy drive is required (not sure whether it's
obvious or difficult to change that). I guess if needed it should not be hard
to borrow an external floppy drive.

Dieter

 

[Guest]

Thanks. I could have installed a floppy drive I suppose. But I ended up
solving my problem slightly differently. My problem was that I could not
install XP Pro with Service Pack 1 over my XP Home with Service Pack 2,
because it won't let you go from sp2 to sp1. Couldn't uninstall sp2, because
the os was installed as sp2. I could have solved it by booting from the Pro
cd and installing, but got the error you were getting.

To solve it, I had to slipstream sp2 into my XP Pro files, then install Pro.
This article:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp
shows how to create a new bootable cd -- but I only needed steps 1-3, and I
upgraded to Pro from files on my harddrive.