I errased a hard disk drive completely after an infection, and when tried to ins

[kusaho]

Hello,
What hapened and how can I fix this? Thank you for your sugestions.

 

[Guest]

Please repost completing the text which was too long to fit the heading. This time put it in the message space.

 

[kusaho]

When I erased the hard drive and tried to reinstall an operating system (XP from Dell), the message appears: "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. My computer is a Gateway notebook, and the OS was Vista. I don't have any Gateway reinstallation CD. What is wrong? Is that about the hard drive or the reinstallation cd? Thank you for your suggestion.

 

[V1ctor89]

Enter Bios and there must be a setting there called "SATA mode" or sthg like that and you must change the value from "AHCI" to "Compatibility mode". It should do the trick, although i say you should use vista or 7, XP is old. Time for some upgrades.

 

[Guest]

You may find that the Dell supplied copy of XP is only intended to work on their machines.

Erasing your hard drive may have wiped a Partition put on it by Gateway containing the back up image of their Windows installation -- that's often how Win is delivered these days instead of a CD.

As per the above posting, check the BIOS screens to make sure that the hard drive is listed -- usually press Del key as the computer first starts -- but see Gateway manual. Once you know the hard drive is recognised by the BIOS look at the boot order -- to install from CD you usually need the DC/DVD drive to boot first.

If the hard drive is present/working and my assumption about the Dell CD only working on a Dell computer is correct you may have to buy a copy of Windows.

Sorry to sound unsympathetic but we see this sort of thing all the time -- I have to ask why you decided to do something so drastic as wiping the hard drive without really knowing what you're doing ??

In future use anti-virus and anti-malware products and wipe only as a last resort.

 

[kusaho]

Best answer selected by kusaho.

 

[easytech101]

the reason you are seeing that error message is the XP disc from Dell does not contain your hard disk's SATA drivers. The only choice you have is using a floppy disk (or external drive if your machine doesn't have one) to add the drivers or to install a different OS, such as windows 7 that would permit you to had those drivers from disk if they weren't already natively provided.

Short of that, like a previous poster suggested, you can manipulate the BIOS settings for RAID performance to IDE or AHCI (should be set on SATA or RAID by default).