harddrive problem help please

[MARTINT123]

i have formatted the hard drive on my dell pc.0ptiplex GX150 now i cant reinstall windows just get message saying primary drives 1&2 not found. in the bios it says hd in secondary 0 cd-rom insecondary 0 i put cd in drive start up same message any help would be great.

 

[cafuddled]

Are they on raid by chance?

 

[mkaibear]

So it is detected in the BIOS but not when the Windows disk comes up?

My suspicion would be that you've got a SATA disk and Windows isn't recognising it. The way to deal with it is to download the drivers, put them on a disk, and when Windows pops up the "Press F6 to install additional drivers", press F6, and navigate to the floppy.

Dell's website should have all the relevant drivers.

 

[rbarone69]

May I ask how you formatted the drive? From the XP install?

Some Dell's have a restore partition that has a ghost image on it. This allows you to reset the system to factory defaults. Not sure if the 150 has it or not, but check the dell site for information on how to run teh restore. Ctrl-F11 or Ctrl-F12 during boot.