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.

Opensource Software

Here's a list of opensource software. Opensource mean that it is a freely distributed piece of software that anyone can use.

File compression/ archiver
7-Zip
features:
-Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
-Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.
-Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
-Self-extracting capability for 7z format
-works in Windows 7 / Vista / XP / 2008 / 2003 / 2000 / NT / ME / 98. There is a port of the command line version to Linux/Unix
http://www.7-zip.org/

Image Manipulation Program
Gimp
features:
-Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
-Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
-Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
-File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
-Extensible
-Support multiple OS platforms
http://www.gimp.org/

Vector graphics editor
Inkscape
features:
-Capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
-Supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface.
-Easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.
http://www.inkscape.org/

3D content creation suite
Blender
features:
-Interface
-Modeling
-Rigging
-Rendering
-Animation
-UV unwrapping
-Shading
-Physics and particles
-Imaging and composition
-Realtime 3D/ Game creation
-Files
-Supported platforms: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X (PPC and Intel), Linux (i386), Linux (PPC), FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), SGI Irix 6.5, Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc).
Full list of features can be found at http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/
http://www.blender.org/

Gnome Partition Editor
GParted
features:
-Partition editor for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions.
-Create a partition table on a disk device.
-Enable and disable partition flags such as boot and hidden.
-Perform actions with partitions such as:

• create or delete
• resize or move
• check
• label
• copy and paste

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php