[Jazmeen]

Well my parents bought me a second hand laptop (Dell brand) out of a government auction. Yeah well all the information was wiped from the previous user and it wasn't Windows XP so we got a Cd to install it on but it kept saying (even when we first turned it on) No Harddisk found or something complex. I'd like to know how do you get it installed and what is it? Is it the actual hard disk drive like to store the information?
Also around how much would it cost (I live in australia but yeah don't bother with the prices otherwise).
Thanks, grateful for any help!
-Jazmeen

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Did you check they didn't remove the drive, rather than wipe it

[Retired Tech]

Did you check they didn't remove the drive, rather than wipe it

[SRX660]

I had this kind of problem when i was buying laptops off Ebay. If there is a hard drive in the laptop what some ebay venders would do is Fdisk the drive and leave it that way. If you are lucky enough to have a laptop that has a floppy drive with it you can use a win 98 boot disk to format the drive as fat 32. You can then set the laptop to boot from the cdrom drive and install XP on the computer. i would also go to the dell website and download any drivers you can find for your model and burn them to a cd so you can install them after installing XP.

Another problem i had with one laptop is that there was a HD but the XP cd still would not work. As a last resort i installed a old 2.5 gig HD i had in the laptop and XP started loading right away. I stopped the install because of the size od the HD. It is just a thought that the HD may be dead your laptop.

I know its a lot of work to do this but i have also done this to get a OS on a laptop that had no floppy drive.

http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm

SRX660

[XxDarkSatoshixX]

so you are saying that u installed windows XP with a disk? well umm XP is only an OS, not a hard disk. reply if its not a xp disk.