How to get win XP setp to recognize hard drive?

[redss]

I want to reinstall Windows XP onto a laptop (Gateway MX6214) that already has XP sp2.

I've reloaded windows from this XP corporate edition CD many times. But this time, the problem is, when I boot off the CD it says "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer."

But if I take the CD out, I can boot off the harddrive into Windows with no problem! But setup won't let me install since the installed version is newer than my CD.

How can I get past this point?

 

[redss]

Anybody?

 

[sminlal]

What's the size of the hard drive, and what SP level of XP is your install disk? The original (pre-SP1) version of XP won't work with drives larger than about 127GB.

 

[Lanqu]

Can't you choose Install New Version? Or no options available?

 

[Wamphryi]

It is most likely that your Install disk is not up to the required service pack so the installer wont recognize the HDD. The way around it is to slipstream Service Pack 3 and the Install disk you have on to another CD. Look up how to slipstream Service Pack 3 onto an XP installation disk.

 

[redss]

Thanks for the replies, all. Unfortunately my problem has worsened. First of all, the hard drive was only about 72 Gb, so I don't know why the original XP disk wouldn't recognize the drive upon bootup.

Anyway, I created a slipstreamed install disk with SP2... it still wouldn't recognize any hard drive when booted from it, but when booting into windows, I was able to begin the install process.

Then suddenly the computer rebooted 2 minutes later...so of course now I can't boot into windows (I get a BSOD) so I'm dead in the water now. What can I do next? How can I format the drive somehow so that it'll be recognized by the install disk?

 

[redss]

Interestingly, I was able to install Ubuntu Linux onto the hard drive, the installer recognized an 80 gig drive.

But the windows installer will STILL not recognize the drive. What can I do?

 

[Hawkeye22]

I don't know if it will help, but can you use a live linux CD and remove all partitions from the drive so that windows will see it in it's raw state?

 

[redss]

the problem is that for some reason I can either boot from the hard drive.. or I can boot from a linux live CD, in which case it is unable to see the hard drive!!! Or maybe I don't know how to make it see the hard drive? /etc/fstab does not contain any entries for /dev/hda (hdb,hdc,hdd) so what can I do to make Linux see the partition?

 

[RetiredChief]

You may need to download the "F6" drivers for the HDD controll that is on your MB. from the mauf. website. If you are using a Sata II controller, XP probably does not have a driver. When I slipstreamed my XP to SP2 (or 3 can not remember which) I also had to add the "F6" driver so that XP could see the HDD.

 

[redss]

I used nLite to slipstream the F6 SATA driver into the XP SP2 install disk, but the installation still didn't recognize the hard drive. I ended up giving up and loading Ubuntu Linux onto the system for now. But I would still like to find out a way to get it loaded, other than purchasing the recovery CD's from HP (which would be the easiest solution)