Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Windows XP Setup Could Not Detect and Find Any Hard Disk Drive

When installing Windows XP, Windows XP Setup Could Not Detect and Find Any Hard Disk Drive error appear and you won't be able install Windows XP. This error may due to SATA hard disk drive not detectable by the windows XP setup thus XP setup can't find usable physical disk and force to quit by pressing F3.

For some of the newer computer system, if the SATA hard disk drive is not running on RAID, older operating system like XP would be able to recognize the SATA drive without needed to install any drivers.

However, for those SATA hard disk drive which requires a driver, normally the motherboard manufacturers will provide a floppy disk (or you may need to copy the content from the motherboard cd driver to floppy disk), which you will be able to use F6 during Windows XP setup to add in the drivers.

The problems now is some of the computer system now doesn't come with floppy disk drive! Online there's a lot of method of using nlite to burn the drivers and create a new XP installation cd using the old XP installation cd.

There's another quick solution to solve this problem instead needed to go to all the hassle of doing that. The trick is by changing BIOS setting to disable AHCI (or RAID which includes AHCI in its functions) and use native SATA IDE emulation mode (SATA/PATA). In SATA IDE Emulation mode, XP setup could find the SATA drives and proceed to continue to install XP properly.

The method to change the BIOS settings on SATA mode is solely depending on which brand or model or even motherboard of your computer system. Check your system manual for more information.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

informative article... i enjoyed reading and learned a lot from your article.

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