XP installer finds no hard drives

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Guest

two new drives. both fdisked and formatted via an old winMe start disk... XP
install finds not drives ... what did i do wrong? thanks! AE
 
ArcticEric said:
two new drives. both fdisked and formatted via an old winMe start disk... XP
install finds not drives ... what did i do wrong? thanks! AE
Click to expand...

Your first step should be to ascertain if the BIOS
recognises the disks. Press the Pause button at
boot time when you see the hard disk table so
that you can examine it at leisure.
 
Yes, thanks, the BIOS seems to have found it. It is a DELL and when loading
the default BIOS settings, the drive is listed. Next step, please :)
 
Under normal circumstances you should now be able
to install WinXP. The installation process would detect
the hard disk and give you the option of repartitioning
and/or reformatting it. Since you report that this is not
happening, there could be something wrong with your
hardware. To confirm it, try this:
- Boot the machine with a Win98 boot disk from here:
www.bootdisk.com.
- Run fdisk.exe to delete all existing partitions and
create new ones. You will, of course, lose all data.
- Mark the first partition active.
- Run format.exe to format the first partition.
- Reboot and see if you can access it.

If this works then you could install WinXP in the first
partition. It will be a FAT32 partition and it will be
limited to 32 GBytes. You could convert it later on
to NTFS.
 
AFAIK No absolute need to format first partition. The install procdure can
do it and in NTFS so directly OK without need to convert
 
Thanks again!
After I wrote you back, I tried "mess'n with BIOS and found that defaut was
at fault .. selected a different setting in BIOS and then the install found
the drive and as I write, it is installing. THANKS AGAIN FOR YOUR TIME TO
HELP! AE
 
You are quite right, of course - if it works! However,
the OP said that he tried it your way and that it failed.
In the meantime he has found out that his BIOS settings
were inappropriate.
 
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