Hi, first post, hope i don't sound too newbish.
Anyways, i have my old computer that was sitting around collecting dust, been aboot a year since i fired it up.
Well I gave it a go cause i plan to turn it into a media PC for my LCD TV, well of course it won't boot up, comes up with it trying a NVidia Bootup for the mobo. So i grabbed the copy of WinXP pro and figure i'll just reinstall it from scratch,when it gets to setup and i try installing xp it says no Harddrive detected and i can only F3 to exit setup. Now the drive is SATA and i say during the boot sequence that it sees the hdd so im pretty confused now, usuallly when all else fails reinstalling cures all that ails you, well thats been my experience

Your advice and help is greatly appreciated here

Cheers,

Soda

Some older M/Bs required the loading of the SATA and Mass Storage driver using the F6 feature at the beginning of the installation.

This was normally done using the A:\ [Floppy Drive], and a Floppy Disk with the SATA drivers loaded on it, if the disk contains the SATA driver and the MAss Storage driver load them both. Pressing S I believe allows you to load a second driver, because it will only allow loading 1 of the drivers at a time.

hmmm, well i don't recall anything coming with the harddrive when i bought it & when i installed it origanally i just plugged it in and installed XP. I guess i need to take a look at the harddrive again to figure the model number and hit the website and see what they have.

Just because it shows in BIOS does not prove it works! Download DFT from IBM/Hitachi and make bootable diskette. You can then test the drive. The Sata drivers would have come with the motherboard, not the hard drive.

Mike.

/////////The Sata drivers would have come with the motherboard, not the hard drive.

@mike99 Affirmative!

@RonSoda The necessary SATA drivers are on your M/B driver CD if you don't have one you can download the SATA drivers from the M/Bs website.

We're obviously not talking a brand name PC here like HP, or Dell, that comes with a restore disk, because the SATA drivers would be on the Restore Disk, and you wouldn't even be aware it had installed them, unless of course at some time in the past you upgraded to WinXP Pro.

If thats the case you would need to Explore the original Restore disk and recover the SATA drivers from it.

Try DFT or Data lifeguard for WD drive.

Mike.

ok, i tried a floopy i had made when i put that computer together, it installed and guess what happened, my hdd is not accessable. so i tried making a partition on it, no go, i could only make a 0mb partition. something is wrong with the drive, i guess i'll try date lifeguard and see if it finds anything wrong with it.
The board is a Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe and the hdd is a WD1200jd. I downloaded Data Lifeguard tools and diagnostics, i will make floppys and test the hdd and see what it comesup with.

Thanx for the help so far

Wow a walk down memory lane, I had one of those M/Bs and it was a fantastic performer, probably one of the best in ASUS track record, it does require the loading of the SATA drivers but is quite easy to work with, you may have to use the WD diagnostic disk and do a Zero Fill, or Disk wipe, whatever the WD Diagnostic disk refers to a LLF [Low Level Format], to wipe out all past data including boot records on the HDD, that basically restores it to factory specs.

Unless of course the diagnostic program gives you a bad report, then it would be best to just replace the HDD.

Probably because you were trying to make the partition in the unpartitioned space which is only normally 8mb left over if the HDD was previously partioned as 1 full size active partition, LLF the HDD and then install XP from scratch loading the SATA drivers at F6, and when it gets to it, give XP the OK to create the necessary partition and format it.