so i have a couple of old computers from my work that we've been formatting, reloading with xp, and giving away to our employees. i'm down the last one and when i boot from the disk it tells me there's no hard drive to format or to load an OS to. um, well, the computer works normally so obviously there's a drive there. tried using killdisk and it formatted, but now won't load the OS. i know the disc works b/c i used it on all the other computers.

i can't let this computer go until it's clean and has an OS. what can i do?

1/25/2010 1:47:33 PM

most likely the boot order is set to boot directly to the hard drive and not to the cdrom

1/25/2010 1:57:18 PM

nope, it's set to boot to the cd (which is how i'm getting to the format and/or install the os option). when i said load the OS, i meant install. sorry if that was confusing.

1/25/2010 2:04:24 PM

what problem do you have when installing?

1/25/2010 2:09:18 PM

it starts it's process to install, and before it can do anything it says "setup did not find any hard disk drives"

1/25/2010 2:27:04 PM

nevermind, figured it out. needed the sata driver, but had no floppy drive. found a program (nlite) that lets you add the driver and make a bootable iso from the winxp disc. it's all good now.

*crosses fingers*

it's still installing. it will probably fail, b/c that is my luck, but we'll see....

1/25/2010 2:52:51 PM

In the bios you can probably set your sata to compatibility mode, which in turn will let you run the utility without doing the sata drivers. This also comes in handy when needing to install the operating system and you don't want to have to deal with the hassle of the F6 install stuff.

1/25/2010 3:20:52 PM

yea, set your sata mode to run in IDE instead of AHCI and no need for drivers to install, when done switch it back. that was where i was headed. nlite is great for integrating sata drivers indeed.

1/25/2010 4:53:08 PM