Re: Reinstallation can't find my hard drives

You have to tell the setup program to load the SATA drivers at the very beginning of the setup routine. Pay close attention to the cue at the bottom of the screen when setups begins, you will see something like:

To specify additional mass storage devices press F6

If you miss the cue you will have to restart the setup routine. To make sure you don't miss the cue just repeatedly tap the F6 key when setup begins. A bit later on Setup will ask you to insert a diskette containing the drivers into drive a:. You MUST supply the drivers on a diskette, the setup program will not accept the drivers from any other media source.

John

tinkerbell wrote:
i am attempting to reinstall Win XP Pro on a machine with 2 SATA hard drives. (Win XP has become sluggish & full of holes). I have rebooted from original XP Pro CD. It inspect system, loads files, starts windows then asks if I want to do reinstall or repair. Whichever I choose it tells me that setup can't find any hard drives on my system.
i have changed over the drives (0 to 1 and vice versa on the motherboard), turned them off and on in the BIOS. No combination has any effect.
when I take out the CD the system boots up just as normal with Win Explorer showing both drives as ever.
What is happening?
Please help

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: xp install on sata drive
    ... Very early in the Setup process, while the line of white rectangles is ... to install the SATA drivers from a floppy diskette. ... SATA drives were not common when WinXP first went on sale in 2001, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: During reinstallation Im told that setup cant find the hard drive/mass storage device - whY?
    ... I then rebooted and went into Setup. ... Looked again in Device Manager and see the following entry in "Disk Drives": ... BIOS ver. ... I've got both drivers on diskette now. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Booting from XP CD - drives not recognized
    ... Repair Install. ... thru their setup interface. ... I do have SATA drives, ... > I'll need to copy their drivers onto a floppy like you said. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: Reinstallation cant find my hard drives
    ... I don't know what sort of reinstallation method Dell supplied, either you would have a reinstallation CD, a Recovery CD or it would make use of a Recovery Partition on the hard drive. ... If you can get around fitting a diskette to the machine the drivers should be easily available for download directly from Dell, go over there and search using you asset tag number and you should find the information that you need. ... If you miss the cue you will have to restart the setup routine. ... Whichever I choose it tells me that setup can't find any hard drives on my system. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment)
  • Re: WINLOGON.EXE
    ... purchase it from someone else as most manufacturer's setup the system to ... >>>download using that as this is a rather large download. ... >>>you install updated drivers, ignore the message about ... >>>System Restore in case you have problems as a result of ...
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