How to get win XP setp to recognize hard drive?

Anybody?

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.

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

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.

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)