I have been trying to reinstall XP on my hard drive. No luck. I have a second IDENTICAL drive (both SATA) and when I have that second drive plugged in, either as a second drive, or as a primary by itself, the XP install program says I have no disks at all.

I can still boot to XP on my original disk, this is the one I am trying to reinstall onto, but I have stripped it down to the bones. I am guessing I am having some issue with the BIOS and the drives and passing that info to XP, but the BIOS sees both drives with no problem. I can boot to my current copy of XP and it sees the second rive fine under that scenario, I formatted it to be NTFS.

I have tried every combination I know of and I can't get the install program to work. Anybody got a clue I what I might try?

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More likely a driver issue.

I avoid Microsoft like the plague, but am forced to use it on occasion. If memory serves, the XP install CD doesn't include SATA drivers, and you have to install them from floppy during the install process.

Without SATA drivers, the XP installer won't see your drives.

Where could i find the drivers? I actually have a floppy so that will work. Is it possible to pull the drivers off my current install? How would I know which files to copy to the floppy?

During the install, XP says to hit F6 if I need to install and drivers, but F6 didn't do anything.

thanks
Fred

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http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Windows-XP-On-SATA-Without-a-Floppy-F6-47807.shtml

Depends on your SATA controller, but likely from the manufacturer.

Google is your friend...there are gazillions of hits for "XP SATA install".

If you don't hit the F6 key within a half a milli second, it won't take you to the screen to load your drivers.

are you sure you dont have the slave/master jumpers incorrect? if you remove the jumpers the drive at the far end of the cable usually becomes the master, did you switch the cable position of the hard drives so the new one is at the end?

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x2
and do your drives have master/slave switches?

You need the SATA drivers. SATA figures out it's own master/slave thing independantly, it's better this way.

F6 at just the right half-second(and then SATA drivers from floppy) or slipstream(aka integrate) the SATA drivers onto your install cd

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This sucks, I downloaded the drivers on to a floppy, did the F6 during setup, it reads the floppy, but still comes up and says I have no drives in the system.

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its not drivers, at least not from the sounds of it.

So you are saying that it only works with the install cd in but when you take the cd out nothing happens, right? If this is the case then you need to set up your boot priority in the BIOS. In the BIOS you need to set the hard drive with the OS to boot. by default it is set to CD boot so you can load a OS but you need to change that to run the OS off the hard drive.

Secondly you set whats the master and slave in the BIOS now, not with jumpers.


So if you have installed the OS but it just wont run without the CD in then change your Boot priority in the BIOS and then problem solved.

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The other way - I can boot to XP which is currently installed in disk 0. I am trying to install XP on disk 1. My current setup see both drives properly. The XP install CD does not see the hard drives, when it is booting. It tries to install than says "no hard drives detected on your system. After doing research, I found out XP has no SATA drivers (until SP2) so that is why you do the F6 and put drivers on the floppy. For some reason this still did not work.

thanks
Fred

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Why not mirror the drive? Every drive manufacturer has a simple program to do that. So, install it, and copy the old drive to the new one.

I downloaded drivers onto a floppy, F6 worked and copied them, but XP still says it does not recognize any hard drives.

I'm a tad frustrated!!!!

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Hmm.

You might try formatting the new one. If it is formatted incorrectly, Windows will not pick it up. Usually the factory NTFS formats are good, but not always. Now why you would see it on the old system and not alone, I don't know.

Also, you might try mirroring to the new drive just to see if the Windows installer picks it up when it is alone. If it does, you can just install over what is there. You have a backup, so if it does not work, no big deal.