Hard Drive Woes

February 7, 2009 4:55 PM

How do I get Windows XP to detect a new hard drive in my laptop?

I have a HP DV1000 laptop. After a catastrophic hard drive crash, I bought a new 320GB hard drive off of NewEgg (seen here). Once I stick in the Windows XP install CD, it doesn't detect the new hard drive. I get the following error message:

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is correct. This may involve running a manufacturer-supplied diagnostic or setup program. Setup cannot continue. To quick Setup press F3."

I went to the HP website and saw that the DV1000 takes ATA-5 hard drives. The one I bought was a SATA 3.0gbps 5400 rpm. Are the two not compatible at all?

Fdisk sees the hard drive and can format it to FAT32. Why can't Windows see it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

posted by mahoganyslide to computers & internet (4 comments total)

What kind of Windows XP CD are you using? (An official Microsoft one?... is it original, or does it have Service Pack2 included?... or is it the HP Recovery CD ?)

There are 2 things I can think off of the top of my head:

1.) The Windows XP install is not detecting your hard drive because its SATA and it doesnt have the correct driver to successfully detect the drive. When you boot from the XP CD, there is a split second when it says "Press F5 to install drivers..."..... You WANT to do that, and feed it the correct SATA / Storage driver so that it can correctly detect your hard drive.

2.) For a drive that big, you might need to use an XP CD that includes Service Pack 2. I vaguely recall some additional drivers/changes integrated into SP2 that help it detect newer/larger drives. ( I hope I'm remembering that correctly)
posted by jmnugent at 5:47 PM on February 7

Windows probably doesn't have the drivers for your SATA controller.

If you don't have a floppy, you're probably going to need to slipstream the drivers into an XP image and install from that. Grab the drivers for the SATA controller from HPs website and then use a tool like nLite to put them into an image that will detect the controller when you try to install.

An alternative is to go into the BIOS and set the controller to "Legacy" mode instead of SATA mode which should allow the installation to detect it like a regular hard drive. You may pay a small penalty in performance but it shouldn't be too bad.
posted by mikesch at 5:56 PM on February 7

mikesch is correct, Windows XP cannot "see" SATA drives unless you get the driver floppy from your computer manufacturer. IF the drive is setup in the BIOS as AHCI, which it should be if you want to gain the benefits of SATA, which you do.

So yes, you need to get a driver floppy for the make and model of your laptop. When Windows setup is starting it will say "press f6 to if you have an aftermarket hard disk controller" or something like that. You'll hit f6, and it won't do anything. But when its done loading, it will ask you to put in that floppy disk.

If you don't have a floppy drive, you have to slipstream it as he says. You *may* be able to insert another CD to copy the drivers instead, I don't remember. It's also possible you can build a usb thumb drive that acts like a floppy and set your BIOS for that mode. Don't remember...
posted by gjc at 6:25 PM on February 7

Thanks for all the help! Setting it to "Legacy" mode was a quick and easy fix.
posted by mahoganyslide at 3:46 PM on February 8