COMPAQ HARDWARE QUARIES RELATED BIOS SETTING

[rameshshrivas]

Hello,
I PURCHASER MY COMPAQ. LAPTOP 4 AND HALF YEARS EARLIER
MY SYSTEM IS NOT DETECTING HARD DISK. WHEN I INSTALLING WINDOW XP A MESSAGE OF NOT DETECTIN YOUR HARD DISK IS SHOWING. I HAVE JUST INSTALL A NEW HARD DISK OF 320 GB IN PLACE OF 160 GB. IN BIOS SETTING THERE IS ALSO NOT SHOWING ANY INFORMATION REGARDING STORAGE.

 

[pepe2907]

Do your computer still recognizes your old HDD? If so then maybe the new disk has a manufacturing fault.

 

[Paperdoc]

If you are installing Win XP on a SATA hard drive, you must go into the BIOS to where the SATA Port Mode is set. The best option is to set it to "IDE (or PATA) Emulation", not to SATA or ACHI or RAID. Win XP knows all about IDE drives. Using this BIOS setting makes the BIOS fool Win XP into thinking it is dealing with a plain IDE drive and it is happy.

The "ideal" BIOS setting for SATA HDD's really is "AHCI". BUT if you do that, the Install routine cannot recognize this type of device - it will say there is no drive available! Then you must have a way to load the AHCI driver from a floppy disk at the very beginning of the Win XP Install process, using the F6 key. Many people cannot do this, so the IDE Emulation Mode is a good solution.

Note that this is NOT an issue for installation of Vista or Win 7 - each of them DOES know how to use AHCI devices. But you are installing XP.