Need to reformat, Windows setup can't find disk

Brodo Faggins

My friend's HP laptop is beyond fucked, malware-wise, and she's given me the go-ahead to format it.
The problem is, after I boot off the Windows XP disk, setup says it can't find any hard disks and asks me to quit.
I can boot into Windows just fine, but any attempts at installing spybot, ad-aware and avg free are instantly shut down and I get multiple error messages.

Any attempts at repairing, disk checking, and defragmenting the hard drive are also shut down, and it responds with multiple error messages.

Any ideas on how to make setup recognize the hard drive? I'm assuming it's physically broken, but it doesn't make sense since I can boot to windows just fine...

matt has a problem

Does she have XP installed on it? Or does she have Vista?

:edit: The cause of the "cannot find hard drive" problem is usually the XP install not supporting the SATA controller, the fix being to create a slipstreamed XP install, details on which you can find here.

AtomBomb

If it's a SATA drive you might need to load drivers first.

stabby

The hard drive(s) are most likely SATA rather than IDE so you need to provide the drivers during setup. Put the drivers on a floppy disk and hit F6 or F7 (I forget) when all the other junk is being loaded into memory during the initial setup phase; the text at the bottom of the screen will tell you when and exactly what button to press.

You can probably find the drivers on the manufacturer's website if you can find out the make & model of the HDD itself - my suggestion is to open up the case and look at the device if you can't just use Everest or something.

Satsumomo

This problem is so stupid, specially because the most recent builds of Windows XP installation discs still don't come with SATA drivers.

Brodo Faggins

It's an XP laptop, with no floppy disk drive. Her dad wants XP, but I'm thinking I'm just gonna throw an RC copy of 7 on there.

Brodo Faggins

Also, I'd slipstream in those drivers, but my burner crapped out on me and all I have left is the windows7 RC disk I made a month ago.

Locust76

Are you just using a plain jane XP disc, or are you using the recovery cd?

pacbowl

You can usually get windows setup to see sata drives without loading drivers by changing the sata options in the bios.

Brodo Faggins

She gave me a Windows XP home with sp2 disc that her dad bought a few years ago.

Also, pacbowl, maybe I should just do that...

Ruckus

Brodo Faggins wrote: »

She gave me a Windows XP home with sp2 disc that her dad bought a few years ago.

Also, pacbowl, maybe I should just do that...

This version of the Windows XP disc does have basic SATA drivers, but they don't always work, depending on the harddrive controller chipset. You can check the BIOS settings and see if there's a SATA compatability mode that can be activated or switched to, otherwise, you'll either need to slipstream the actual SATA drivers or get a USB Floppy drive and create a driver floppy for use during installation (assuming the pc doesn't already have a floppy drive, in which case you can just use that one).