Yesterday afternoon I got my spiffy new Dell in which will be my desktop in my home office. I decided to plop Windows 2003 Server on it since I want to setup several different things to play with.
So, I popped in my trusty CD, fired up the installer, and began. I got only part-way in when I got the dreaded message that Setup couldn’t find my hard drives. Which is strange, because my hard drives are IDEs, not SCSI, so it shouldn’t have a problem.
Turns out I’m not the only one. I stumbled across this post which helped me solve it. Here’s the relevant bit:
Reboot your system and hit F2 as soon as you see the Dell startup screen (the options are F2 for setup, F12 for boot sequence).
In the System Setup screen, do these steps.
– Select Drives:
– Make sure your Diskette Drive (3.5 floppy) is set properly (Usually set to Internal)
– Make sure that “Drive 0: SATA-0” drive is set to “ON”Go to “SATA Operation”:
Your system proabaly came set to “RAID Autodetect / AHCI” – THIS SETTING CAUSES YOUR SYSTEM TO GO INTO AN IDE LOOP AND DOESN’T ALLOW IT TO FIND YOUR FACTORY INSTALLED SATA DRIVE.
CHANGE THE SATA OPERATION SETTING TO “COMBINATION”
Reboot – make sure that the boot sequence is set to CD rom before HD and make sure that the reinstall CD is in the drive. Setup will load, hit enter to reinstall XP. Your HD should now be detected and you should see the licensing agreement.
And with that, I was up and running. Thanks most excellent internet poster!
I had this problem once when I was installing WinXP, but fortunately I had a floppy disk with the driver (Samsung SATA RAID 120GB).
When I installed Fedora Core 4 in dual boot, it recognized my HD automatically.
Some things that Linux has advanced a little faster… ;)
Thanks Thiago. Although, in this case I don’t think it was a driver problem, but the system not seeing the drive itself. I’m sure I’ll be doing many reinstalls on that machine, so next time I wipe it I’ll give Gentoo a go to see if it can recognize it.
BTW – cool blog (even if I can’t understand a word of it ;))
Wow, that was my troubles all day. Thanks a bunch
thanks for this posting. It was exactly my problem, and it saved me a huge amount of time!
cheers chap sorted us right out…(after buying a new HD I might add thinking it was a hardware failure)
Thank you Cory Foy
Thanks for the info, Im on a brand new Inspiron 1525 that came with Vista and attempting to happily down/up grade to XP :) when this prob came up,it’s a new machine so I knew the prob could not be Hardware, so I googled and found this site and your tip solved the problem thanks.
omg i was working on my moms computer and this happened so i freaked and hit google. thanks man you saved me big time.
Amazing post, you just solved hours of frusteration and cash to pay for support, thanks a bunch.
Thank you…saved me a headache…
Cory:
Thanks. I was receiving the same problem and your advice fixed it.
Thanks.
Hey, I work for the Sacramento Sheriff's Toy Project. Computer refurbishing section.
I run across this problem 4 to 5 PCs per day.We just scrap them out for parts.
Fantastic advice… exactly what I needed while trying to rebuild this Dell Dimension 9100 and install XP. I tried with SuperFdisk to zero partitions etc, but it still wouldn’t recognize the drive. Now it is formatting happily under the WXP setup program… thanks!!!
This solved my problem on a Thinkpad. Switch AHCI to ” compatibility” in the BIOS. Thank you!
Well, I’m happy for all of you but it didn’t help me. Grrr! I had already tried what Coy suggested on my own (Tried every combination of things) And it still doesn’t see my drive! Dell Dim. 8400 new 320 gig drive. It doesn’t give me any errors using the “Combination” but Win XP says it can’t find a drive….Anyone else suffering?