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windows install hard drive not found

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by brian 1 view

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I have a dell Dimension 8400. It has a virus on its current 80 GB SATA hard drive and wanted to start new with a 200 GB SATA hard drive. I have removed the cables from the current drive and connected them to the new drive. I can see the drive in the BIOS, but when the windows install starts it says that it can not find any drives. I removed the drive and put a jumper on it to reduce it to 1.5, reinstalled drive and get same message. I then put in another 80 GB hard drive to make sure it wasn't a drive size issue, and same result. Anyone have any ideas? I have not flashed the bios because it recognized the drive.

6 replies

by thumbsup2

If you're using a plain MS branded CD to try and install Windows, you'll need the SATA drivers durring install (pressing F6 at the correct time) so that Windows can see the drive.

If you're using a manufacturer's recovery CD, it should have the SATA drivers built into it.

by peconet tietokoneet

When you load on Windows you will have to look for the "press F6 to load third party drivers", this is when you have to load the floppy into the floppy drive.
To get the SATA drivers onto the floppy disk,
Load in your Motherboard driver disk and reboot your computer, you will see two lists, one for 64 bit SATA driver and the other for 32 bit SATA driver, you need the 32 bit driver (unless you have the 64 bit Windows version, of which you will have to choose the 64 bit option).
Now put in your floppy disk and press the "enter" key on your keyboard, it will come up with something like " this will format your disk, do you want to carry on?", just accept, now it will write the SATA driver to your floppy disk. When finished take out the disk but have it ready, now load on Windows, when you see "F6 for third party drivers", load on your floppy disk, press the "F6" key on your keyboard, this will now load on your SATA drivers into Windows.
Hope this helps you out.

by rob miners

Extract and Copy the SATA Drivers to a Floppy Disk. Boot from the XP CD and when prompted, press F6 to install the SATA drivers from the floppy disk. If you haven't a Floppy Drive Slipstream your XP installation with the SATA drivers.

How To: Slipstream your XP installation

Download nLite

http://home.midmaine.com/~nlite/nlite/nLite-1.4.8.installer.exe

http://www.nliteos.com/guide/

These are the steps that I took

Download the Sata Drivers from the manufactures web site.

Installed Nlite

Extracted Sata Drivers to a folder named Sata using WinRar. http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm

Copied the entire XP CD to a folder named XPS

Ran Nlite and Browsed to the XPS folder, Next, next then selected Drivers and Bootable ISO click next

At the Drivers Tab click insert, single driver and navigate to the folder with the inf for windows XP.

Highlight it and select open and select next. Select Textmode driver and select the XP Sata driver and click OK.

Click next and Yes to apply changes, next and select Make ISO. Burn it to CD using Nero or any other Software that will support the ISO Image.

How to burn an ISO Image:

http://www.ubcd4win.com/burn.htm

by brian

Thank you all who responded. I had not loaded the driver and when I tried still got a message to insert driver disk. I finally figured out that the floppy drive had gone bad. Replaced and used driver and loaded fine. Thanks again.

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