WinXP setup can't find HDD

[mooncancook]

Trying to do a clean install of XP on a Dell M1330 laptop. During the initial phase of the setup, it says no HDD found. I checked the bios and it's showing the 320GB SATA HDD there. What else can I try?

 

[bsobel]

Youll need the sata drivers on a floppy disk, add them via f6 when text mode setup starts.

 

[mooncancook]

Really? I never had any problem installing XP to a SATA drive on my desktop PCs. And I don't know where to find a floppy drive now.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: mooncancook
Really? I never had any problem installing XP to a SATA drive on my desktop PCs. And I don't know where to find a floppy drive now.

XP SP1 (SP2?) has drivers for some sata chipsets, but not all. You can also see if your bios has an ide emulation mode...

 

[RebateMonger]

The the notebook's BIOS has an option to use SATA drives in IDE Emulation mode, you can choose that and no SATA controller drivers will be required.

Otherwise, you can either acquire a USB Floppy drive that's XP-Install-compatible, or you can slipstream the required SATA controller drivers into a new XP Install CD using nLite. I've had problems manually slipstreaming Dell OEM XP Install CDs in the past (because of the way that Dell has created their own slipstreamed Install CDs). Hopefully, nLite is clever enough to get around any such problem.