XP Install Problem

[JRW160]

I am trying to install xp on my computer, and I reformatted my hd on another computer in ntfs format. I boot from the cd and it loads the drivers or whatever. I hit enter when the screen comes up that says press enter to setup xp, and then a screen comes up that says "hard drive not found on the computer, press F3 to restart the computer." I have no idea what to do now. BTW, the hard drive is recognized in the bios when the computer first starts up.

 

[NogginBoink]

This happens when the hard drive controller on your motherboard doesn't have a driver that ships with WXP. Most likely, you're using a RAID chip on the motherboard and there's no driver for that chip in the box with WXP.

Go to your motherboard manufacturer's website. They should have a download for you that includes at least one *.sys (driver) file and a txtsetup.oem file. Put these on a floppy disk.

Restart XP installation. Early on, it'll prompt you to press F6 if you have a disk controller driver to use. Press F6. Be patient; nothing will happen immediately. Later, it'll prompt you for the floppy disk with the driver on it. Put that in, and away you go!

 

[JRW160]

I know I am not running a raid chip, because my mobo is pretty old. I am trying to put xp on and older gateway pc with a p3 450 and 384mb ram. I will check out the motherboard manufacturers website though, if I can find it.

 

[Whitedog]

I don't know if this is accurate or not, but I believe setup has to have a partition it can read from to install from scratch... I don't know whehter or not it can read an NTFS partition or not from the initial setup...?

I've always had a FAT32 partition avalable when running the initial setup and haven't had any problems... I have setup convert it to NTFS.

Try to format the drive with FAT32 and see what happens...


If I am wrong about all this, my appologies... I'm just sharing what I know.

 

[NogginBoink]

Nope. You can install XP on a raw, unpartitioned hard drive.

The error message really does mean that XP can't find a physical hard drive. The reason is that it's not loading the right disk controller driver.

 

[dbwillis]

I installed XP onto a bare 80gb drive last night, I came across one error at the beginning and it was the same error you were getting, I found the fix to be the order the PC was booting and looking for drives, it was cdrom, floppy, hdd, I changed it to cd, hdd, floppy and it booted up, found drive, partitioned/formatted and installed.
Good luck