Hard drive not installed

Phire

Baseband Member
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I'm trying to install Windows XP. but it says i have no hard drive installed on my computer but i am sure that the hard drives are connected, and i have a partition for Windows ready for it to be installed on. help? how do i install them, then?
 
can you get to your bios setup screen from there you can check your coputer. It's probably the only way we can tell from here. How far do you get in the setup.
 
Hmm, weird you say you have a partition ready for windows to be installed on. Does this mean you already have a partition with files on? I'd guess so.

Does it read the drive when the computer is listing the devices in in bootup? It should appear as a Master. If not, this will be your problem. If it appears as Slave, take the hard drive out and make sure the hard drive at the back has the jumpers set to Master (should have a diagram) and also check that you have the Hard drive in IDE1 and all your CD drives in IDE2 though this won't cause it not to work. Its just the default way.

Hopefully after you have checked these, it will now list it at bootup as being a Master drive and windows should read from it.

If its not listing though, it'll definitley be something to do with the connectors, though try this too:

Go into Bios (del at bootup) and check like Rdcmmnst says that the hard drive under the first menu is set to be read after the CD rom is, just to be sure, as if its not listed as a bootup liek this:

First Boot: CDrom
Second Boot: IDE1 Hard drive (or something)

it might not find it when windows is setting up.

I hope this helps :)
 
I can get into my BIOS setting, and everything works there. I found out that my Primary IDE Master and Primary IDE Slave aren't installed or something. Does that matter? (I'm a newb at this).

-- Yeah it does read the thingies. The thing is I installed Linux recently, hated it, and wanted Windows back, but I messed up the hard drives or something to make it a non-RAID format. Because it is suppose to be a RAID format, but somehow with Linux I got it to be a non-RAId format.
 
Yeah, your IDE is what sees the hard drives and controls them. Its weird how they're not installed. Doesn't it show at bootup then as its listing devies?
 
Yeah. It does show up. This is realling ticking me off. I just want Windows back! :(
 
If its showing up, then its obviosuly detecting the drive.

By any chance do you have SATA drives and not IDE?

Check at the bottom of the motherboard for the IDE slots, is one being used by the drive?
 
Just realised how ridiculous that last post of mine sounded like. So I have found that Yes, they are SATA.
 
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