XP Installation CD Can't See Hard Disks

[ChristosVL]

I try to install WinXP on a laptop with Vista pre-installed and the Win Xp
installation utility says that no hard drives were detected. I don't have a
floppy drive to load any drivers (if that was required with the F6 option).
The drives are both WD Scorpio Blue WDC-1600BEVS. Is there a way around this
problem? I need XP to run some programs not yet compatible with Vista.

Thanks in advance

 

[Malke]

I try to install WinXP on a laptop with Vista pre-installed and the Win Xp
installation utility says that no hard drives were detected. I don't have
a floppy drive to load any drivers (if that was required with the F6
option). The drives are both WD Scorpio Blue WDC-1600BEVS. Is there a way
around this problem? I need XP to run some programs not yet compatible
with Vista.

There is no way around the problem. You need to provide SATA drivers on a
floppy for XP. You can purchase a USB floppy drive or you can slipstream
the SATA drivers into your XP installation CD.

Slipstream RAID or SATA controller drivers:
http://www.maximumpc.com/2005/01/how_to_slipstre.html
http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/36/SESSID=8b0c51fd6eca712e465d2e6f79256fc8/

Since you only need to run a few programs, a better solution might be to use
virtual computing with Vista as the host system instead of trying to
dual-boot or replace Vista with XP. Using a program like Microsoft's
Virtual PC 2007, VMware (my preference), or even Sun's Virtual Box, you
create a virtual machine running XP. Then you don't need to worry about
SATA drivers. The hardware in a virtual machine is virtualized and is not
the actual hardware in your computer.

For instance, I'm responding to you from a virtual machine running SUSE
Linux hosted on Mac OS X. I use a VMware program.

For more information about virtual computing, Google "Virtual PC" or
"VMware".

Malke

 

[Paul]

I try to install WinXP on a laptop with Vista pre-installed and the Win Xp
installation utility says that no hard drives were detected. I don't have a
floppy drive to load any drivers (if that was required with the F6 option).
The drives are both WD Scorpio Blue WDC-1600BEVS. Is there a way around this
problem? I need XP to run some programs not yet compatible with Vista.

Thanks in advance

Can you go into the BIOS and change the operating mode of the
disk interface ? Some chipsets now offer three options, like
IDE, AHCI, and RAID. If you use IDE, then WinXP SP1 or later,
should be able to use the built-in Microsoft driver.

Paul

 

[jbd4020]

Can you go into the BIOS and change the operating mode of the
disk interface ? Some chipsets now offer three options, like
IDE, AHCI, and RAID. If you use IDE, then WinXP SP1 or later,
should be able to use the built-in Microsoft driver.

    Paul

I just had this same problem a couple days ago trying to reinstall XP
Pro after replacing a bad HD. It would not recognize the new HD, but
BIOS would.

I also could not use the A drive because of some error message, which
i think is another XP bug.

Anyway, the way i got it to recognize the drive was changing the BIOS
settings.

I had to turn SATA RAID _off_.

Then my 2 HD's appeared in BIOS, so I manually set them to on (this
may not be the exact phrase, but the other option besides "off"), and
then XP was able to read them.

So you have to turn RAID off and set the HD(s) to "on" manually in
BIOS.

That worked for me. Your mileage may vary.

 

[Jason]

Ny fresh install finds the SATA drive connected to the motherboard but not
the IDE drives conencted to the PCI adaptor!