Hard Disk Gone Missing?

After booting from the Windows XP setup CD the blue setup screen appears and goes the through the usual process of installing its drivers. When you reach the Welcome Screen and choose to install Windows you are presented with the error Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer similar to the screenshot below.

Some Common Symptoms

You are presented with the error message: Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer at the point in the setup where you are asked to press ENTER to setup Windows XP now You are presented with the error message Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer after pressing R to repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console

Explanation
This error will appear most often when your hard disk is on an SATA or SCSI controller and Windows setup does not have a suitable driver. In most cases these days you wont have a floppy disk either to load the drivers. There are a few ways to deal with this ranging from the very simple (hopefully says you!) to the long and somewhat difficult. See the solutions below for more.

Solution 1 Set Your SATA Controller to Compatability/IDE/Standard Mode

1. Enter your BIOS/Setup Utility 2. Locate the Serial ATA or SATA configuration section o Ive seen this section called On Chip Config on some Phoenix Award BIOS o On Lenovo/IBM ThinkPads its in Config > Serial ATA (Sata) 3. Change the mode of the SATA controller from AHCI to IDE or Compatibility 4. Save & Exit 5. Reboot and begin the Windows Setup again.

6. If Windows Setup successfully detects your hard disk this time then go ahead and perform the Windows Setup. 7. When Windows setup completes change the mode back to AHCI in the BIOS 8. If your problem still exists after changing this option then change it back to AHCI and proceed to Solution 2 below.

Solution 2 Load your SATA drivers using a Floppy Disk (or CD)
UPDATE JAN 2011 Create A Custom Windows XP CD with your SATA drivers as an alternative to using a floppy disk. If you need help finding your SATA drivers see the article How To Find Your SATA Drivers
1. If you already have a floppy disk drive in your computer then great, proceed to

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
8.

Step 2. If you dont, click here to get one Go to either your computer manufacturers support website or if you have a custom build then go to your mainboards manufacturers support website and download the SATA driver package. Some popular manuafacturers are listed below: HP/Compaq Support IBM/Lenovo Support Dell Support Extract the downloaded driver to a blank floppy disk DO NOT insert the floppy disk into the computer that you are attempting to run Windows Setup on Insert your Windows XP CD and start your computer, press any key to boot from CD if requested As soon as the blue setup screen appears press F6 on your keyboard. The message to press F6 will disappear and be replaced by a message requesting you to press F2 for ASR. Do NOT press F2. After the Setup is loading files part is complete you will be presented with the screen below Insert the floppy disk you created and press S to Specify Additional Device. Windows will load your driver and you can now continue Windows Setup as normal.

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Resolving "Setup did not find any hard disk drives" during Windows XP Installation
One of the most popular topics among our readers is installing Windows XP on your new Windows Vista computer sometimes for compatibility reasons, but also because a lot of people just dont like Vista very much. The problem that people keep running into left and right is getting to the point where XP starts to install and getting the message Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. This error happens because your new computer has a storage controller that isnt supported natively in XP, usually an SATA (Serial ATA) controller.

If you dont have a floppy drive in your computer (who does anymore), then youll need to use a process called slip-streaming to integrate the storage drivers into your XP installation CD. It should go without saying that this is an advanced topic, so proceed with caution. Creating a Custom XP Install Well use a software called nLite to create a new XP install cd, so youll first need to download and install it. Once it starts up, youll be prompted for your Windows installation, so youll want to click the Browse button.

First youll be prompted for the Windows installation, which really means your XP install CD. Find it and select the root of the installation, and then click OK to go to the next dialog.

Next youll be prompted on where you want to save the temporary files used during the slipstreaming process. I chose to create a new directory and called it XPISO, but you can put it wherever youd like. I just recommend to use a new directory.

nLite will copy all the necessary files off the XP installation and into the temporary folder. When its done, youll see all the information on which version it is.

Hit the next button until you come to this screen, where you can select what options you want. Select Drivers and then Bootable ISO.

Side note: You can select any of the other options if youd like. nLite will let you bundle updates, set tweaks or automatically remove components from the installation, but that all goes beyond the scope of this article. Hit the next button until you get to the screen for selecting drivers. If you click the Insert button, you can choose between adding a single driver or adding a folder of drivers. Since well just be

loading a single driver, you can choose that option, but you might want to first read the section below about finding drivers for XP.

Browse to the directory where you extracted the driver files, and then select Open. Note that it doesnt really matter which of the *.inf files you choose, because it will select all files in the folder anyway.

nLite will prompt you to select your driver. If you dont know which exact one it is, you can either use Device Manager in Vista to find the exact model, or you can just select all of them. Just be careful not to select a 64-bit driver if you are using 32-bit, or the wrong OS version.

I would recommend including both Storage and Network drivers, as those are the most common drivers that are missing in XP.

Once you proceed to the next screen, now we can finally finish the process. You can choose to directly burn the cd here, or you can select Create Image to create an ISO file that you can burn to a CD using whatever burning tool you have. Note: If you chose to create an ISO, make sure to use the Make ISO button before you click Next.

At this point you can burn the ISO image to a CD, and then start your XP installation process. Finding Drivers for XP The best place to search for drivers for your hardware is at the manufacturers support website. The only problem is that almost every manufacturer seems to distribute their drivers in floppy disk image form, even though the computer they are for doesnt have a floppy drive. Guess nobody has alerted them to get with the program. We can still extract the drivers using an application called WinImage. Lets run through a quick example Here you can see the Intel SATA controller driver for my HP computer.

I downloaded and ran the executable, which extracted a file called f6flpy32.exe into a temporary directory. Dont bother trying to run this one, because itll just prompt you for a floppy drive.

So how to get the drivers out of this file? There are a few options that you can try, depending on how the manufacturer packed the files.

You can use Winimage to extract them, which is a shareware software, but you can use it during the trial period for free. You can try and use WinRar to extract the file. In many instances this will extract a *.flp file, which you can mount in a VMware virtual machine or potentially with some ISO mounting software. Some drivers will allow you to automatically extract into a directory. Youll have to try it and see what happens. Other methods? If youve got other ideas, leave them in the comments and Ill add them to this list.

Heres the list of files that Winimage can handle, which is quite a lot.

Start WinImage and then open the file, and you should see the contents. Just extract them to a folder, preferably with a useful name so you can remember it later.

Good luck with your installation,

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