Can't Detect PC Drives While Installing Windows XP

07
2014-07
  • Mars

    I have an old netbook lying around, I installed Windows 7 two days ago, and it worked great. I decided I need to install Windows XP.

    During the process, it showed me that Windows XP can't be installed since it didn't detect a valid Windows NT to upgrade it. I improvised and deleted all partitions by using GParted (thinking that Windows 7 was causing the problem because it can't downgrade that as an "upgrade"), so now all partitions (except "system reserved") are unallocated, I re-entered the setup and went through all the way up until I need to choose the destination Drive of the installation, there I found it doesn't recognize ANY HDD drives, only the USB I'm booting from.

    I rebooted again into GParted and made a partition (NTFS - 50GB) and saved the work. Booted the WinXP setup and same thing, can't detect anything but the USB device. I've actually repartitioned all Drives (except the one that says "system reserved" and it's about 100MB) and still nothing is showing in my WinXP Setup. Any suggestions?

    • Answers
  • The_aLiEn

    Check BIOS AHCI options for disk controllers. Older operating systems can have problems With some newer hardware, especially SATA drives, with AHCI enabled. Disabling AHCI, or setting configuration to IDE forces BIOS to communicate with a legacy perspective.

    Try selecting IDE and reboot to O.S. setup.

  • Andrew Crawford

    Remove the system reserve, it will probably be GPT partition which xp can not read.

  • Ganesh R.

    Windows XP did not have built in drivers for sata controllers. You may have to manually slipstream the drivers using a software like nlite and use the modified CD to format the PC


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  • emgee

    So I have a 5 bay hot swap SATA enclosure that's connected to a Silicon Image-based SATA adapter in a computer. It's running XP Pro. There are two 1.5TB hard drives in slots 1 and 2 respectively, set up using RAID 1 using the the Silicon Image utility. There are also two 1TB drives in bays 3 and 4, also set to RAID 1 the same way. The partitions for both RAID arrays are Dynamic partitions.

    A few days back, there was a bare hard drive that needed some files copied off of, so it was popped it in bay 5, that bay to pass-through, and the copied data off of it. Later, I noticed that my 1.5TB drives no longer showed up in windows. In the Silicon Image utility, the drives showed up fine, no error. However, in Device Manager, it shows the RAID 1 array as uninitialized. It shows up as the right size, etc., but nothing else.

    There's no sign of anything wrong with either drive, so I'm not sure what happened exactly. I'm not the only one who has access to that computer, so it is possible there is something else done to it that I don't know of. There's quite a lot of data on it still, and if at all possible, I'd prefer to not send it to Ontrack.

    Does anyone know of software that would restore the partitions, keeping in mind that it's a Windows LDM partition? I have access to a variety of Operating Systems, so something that would work on Mac, Windows or Linux would be acceptable. The programs I usually use are not compatible with LDM.


    • Related Answers
  • Am1rr3zA

    my 2 favorite programs for emergencies like this:

    Partition Table Doctor

    WinHex

    neither one is free but they're well worth the money (and cheaper than Ontrack :)