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laptop hard drive will not show up in computer management.

By dc3886 ·
I took the hard drive out of my Omnibook 900 and wanted to put Windows XP on it. I am unable to do this with a cd because I do not have a cd rom drive. I should add that I bought this laptop off of ebay so there is absolutely nothing on the hard drive because it was cleaned off before I bought it.I bought an external enclosure to connect my hard drive to my pc so I can format and use this hard drive. My computer recognizes the hard drive and I can see it in device manager. It is listed as IBM-DBCA-206480. When I click on the properties and open the volumes tab then click on populate nothing comes up. This drive does not show up in computer management at all. Its weird because when I put this hard drive back in the omnibook and look at the bios it shows the hard drive perfectly.

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This should sort it out for you

by Jacky Howe In reply to laptop hard drive will no ...

but to get XP on the drive is another story. Write down all fixed Disk and CD/DVD drive letters so as not to delete them. DO NOT delete any of the fixed hard disk drives or CD/DVD optical drives registry values.
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1. Login with Administrative privileges.
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2. Disconnect all USB or FireWire storage devices.
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3. Open Registry Editor and navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
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4. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices there will be registry keys with the name that resembles the format of \DosDevice\X: where X can be any alphabet letter which corresponding to your physical system drive letter.
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5. Delete all possible USB drives, FireWire drives and external drives which have a drive letter.
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<b>DO NOT delete any of the fixed Hard Disk Drives or CD/DVD optical drives registry values.</b>
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Exclude \DosDevice\A: which normally reserved for floppy disk drives.
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If the above

by Jacky Howe In reply to This should sort it out f ...

does'nt help. When you are in Disk Management right click on the Drive and create a Partition.

Let us know how you get on.

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It would be best if.....

by ThumbsUp2 In reply to laptop hard drive will no ...

Since the HDD is empty (blanked), you will be doing a fresh install. It's always best if that HDD is fitted into the machine it will be used on (unless you have an exact duplicate) so you don't have problems moving the HDD to another machine later. That causes licensing issues as well as the fact it may not boot on the laptop when you put it in there.

Instead of buying the external enclosure, you should have purchased an external CD/DVD reader (or better yet a writer). You could have connected that to the laptop via USB and booted to the XP CD in order to do the initial install.

So, if you've still got a few bucks left, go get an external reader/writer and put the empty HDD back into the laptop where it belongs.

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