xp home format attempt.. hard drive not found

[dosja]

I am attempting to format my harddrive on my pc. While using the method of rebooting w/ the xp installation cd, I get to the point were I press enter stating that "yes" "I want to set up windows xp now". It starts loading a bunch of stuff then gives me a message saying "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer" press F3 to quit, no other option, it just stops the whole process. Not allowing me to get to the point were I need to agree to the license agreement.

Then I've tried the method of using an Ms-dos boot disk to run in dos mode, and use the killdisk.exe program to format the drive, but no, the killdisk boot disk will not execute. But i did notice something weird though, I could not change over from the A:\ drive to the C:\ drive by command, It would not let me... therefore, i was not able to attempt the format c: command...

If anyone has ever run into any kinda problem similar to this any help would be great thx.

[saphalline]

Gonna need more info here. Hardware would be nice. Is this an old PII system or a new PD system? Without any guidance here, we're just shooting in the dark. Could be anything, from a dead hard drive to a bad cable to an improper installation to dust build-up to a chipset limitation to a BIOS size problem to... etc.

[Paul Komski]

I am attempting to format my harddrive on my pc.
Sounds like you may have had a working system that has failed in some way. What happened and was WinXP on the drive previously?

First place to check would be the BIOS setup to see if the drive is recognised there in any shape or form. If not then the seach is on to diagnose a hardware related problem.

[dosja]

My OS is opperating fine, I just have loads and loads of pieces of software that will not completey erase when you add/remove them, bit and traces of them still hanging around in my harddrive taking up space. And I simply want to start over with a new slate ya know. The Harddrive info is as follows: WDC WD800JD-75HKA1 . I am using the Windows xp home edition, version 2002, service pack 2. Every Diagnostics check I run says that everything is fine with my hardware, so I am completely lost now.

[Paul Komski]

If the C: drive is an NTFS formatted parition then dir will not see if from an msdos based floppy. Fdisk should however be able to detect a non-dos partition.

It appears this is a SATA drive and you will probably need to Press F6 soon after booting to the installation CD (watch for the prompt at the bottom of the screen) to install the SATA/RAID drivers from a floppy diskette which you should have ready. Without these drivers setup will not probably see the drive - just as you have already described.

[saphalline]

Depending on the chipset, Paul is correct. It sounds like this is the case if the BIOS cannot automatically see the hard drive.

[Paul Komski]

It sounds like this is the case if the BIOS cannot automatically see the hard drive.
This is often somewhat hard to understand but I think that you, saphalline, descibed it better in another post where you described how modern chipsets can fool OSes (don't remember the exact words) into believing that the native SATA controllers were IDE controllers.

This is different from the BIOS seeing and, importantly, enumerating the hard drives on the whole system. Thus FDisk, for example, can often see and even partition SATA drives on older systems where they are presented as "SCSI" devices to the system. This may or may not require them to be incorporated in RAID sets. As long as fdisk can see them then Win9x/ME (being full PnP OSes) can be installed without any additional drivers during setup. However the NT-based OSes do require the drivers to be incorporated in the setup (mostly by using the F6 key during setup) since they "override" the BIOS, poll the system for themselves and wont detect the "SCSI" drives unless the drivers have been provided. It is therefore, perhaps ironically, often more difficult to install WinXP than Win98 onto many SATA drives (under the 127GB barrier of course).

In this case the give away is that the operating system is "working fine" and yet the installation CD couldnt see a hard drive. The conclusion being that the drivers were thus required by set up and that there was no BIOS related issue at the bottom of it.