Vista PC won't reformat

[Xorp]

A friend of mine asked me to upgrade his new Dell laptop from Vista to XP.
When I go to install XP from boot, it gives a error message no hard drives are found.
Ok, so I thought I'd try something a little more forceful. I ran DBAN to wipe it, and it also said no hard drives were found! Vista still boots up fine though.

How do I allow the hard drive to be wiped to allow XP to be installed?
(There are XP drivers for everything on Dell's support site BTW, so it is possible to get XP running fine on this computer).

 

[Billb2]

Are you booting the XP install CD, not from the HD?

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: Xorp
A friend of mine asked me to downgrade his new Dell laptop from Vista to XP.
When I go to install XP from boot, it gives a error message no hard drives are found.
Ok, so I thought I'd try something a little more forceful. I ran DBAN to wipe it, and it also said no hard drives were found! Vista still boots up fine though.

How do I allow the hard drive to be wiped to allow XP to be installed?
(There are XP drivers for everything on Dell's support site BTW, so it is possible to get XP running fine on this computer).

The error message you are receiving is likely because Windows XP does not have the drivers needed to detect your hard drive. This usually happens with SATA disks, and depending on how old the XP CD is it may not have the SATA drivers loaded. Vista loads just fine because it has the drivers needed to actually see that there is a hard drive there.

Dell may have the storage drivers you need. By finding the storage drivers there you should be able to load them onto a floppy. When booting off the XP CD just hit F6 while it is loading and it will seek drivers from the floppy when prompted.

 

[BladeVenom]

To add to what Tarrant64 said, you can also slipstream XP with service pack 2. Several sites explain how to do it.

 

[mechBgon]

Thread moved from Software For Windows to Operating Systems.

AnandTech Moderator
mechBgon

 

[DrGreen2007]

Sp2 wont help, it doesnt have the AHCI drivers in it, you need to change the Sata mode from AHCI to legacy in the BIOS.

(Dell with an AMD CPU? That would be using an ATI southbridge, which Xp sp2 would not have in it)

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

From the Recovery Console with the Vista media in the DVD drive, change to the BOOT folder then:

bootsect /nt52 C: