[man6ano]

I'm trying to do a fresh install on a compaq presario laptop. I fdisked and formatted using a bootdisk.com tools disk. The BIOS seems to recognise it and did a full check that the drive passed. Bootdisks recognize it as well. When I try to load XP it says no drives recognized. I even installed Ubuntu on it and it worked fine. Tried the XP disk after that and still doesn't recognize. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

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Chances are that you will need a special SATA driver to get the disk to see your drive, because the CD doesn't have it built in.

What model Presario do you have?

[The Admiral]

Chances are that you will need a special SATA driver to get the disk to see your drive, because the CD doesn't have it built in.

What model Presario do you have?

[man6ano]

Compaq Presario C304NR Notebook PC

[man6ano]

Sorry double post

Edited by man6ano, 20 July 2008 - 09:37 PM.

[cmpm]

Perhaps try this.
It is for your model.

Seems you have to start over, installing the OS.
Using the directions found here.

http://h10025.www1.h...r...228&lang=en

I hope it works for you.

[man6ano]

I downloaded the file which was a floppy image. The laptop does not have a floppy, so I extracted the image to floppy on another machine. I put those files on a thumbdrive and tried hitting F6 to load drivers, but the thumb drive was not recognized. Tried the same thing with a usb external drive. The drive was seen by Win98SE but OS wouldn't install. Ubuntu installed fine, ran fine, so the HD is working. I learned about nLite and created a disk with all the SATA/RAID drivers from the HP floppy. The drivers loaded successfully, but WinXP install still doesn't see the drive. Ive used just about every partition/format/drive check tool out there and everything checks out fine. Even the disk check tool in BIOS checked out. I just can't figure this one out. Hopefully someone can see this at a different angle. I'd really appreciate some help on this one.

[boy9enius08]

what you do instead of just finding the different sata drivers for your computer.. as that didnt work for me as well.. you can slip stream the latest service pack into your windows installation files and burn a new cd.

you can do this using nlite

found here http://www.nliteos.com/download.html

and you can download the latest service pack which is SP3 here http://www.microsoft...;displaylang=en

run nlite and slipstream sp3 into it make sure you choose the option of bootable cd . hopefully when you burn a new XP CD. by selecting DIRECT BURN.. the installation will hopefully now recognize your harddrive

[man6ano]

I am using Roxio. Do you recommend any special way to burn the output from nlite?

[man6ano]

I did the SP3 slipstream. Same problem. Seems anything but WinXP sees the drive. Even old Win98 bootdisks see it?

[man6ano]

I have now also tried BartPE with no success. Not sure what I was doing of course, but couldn't get it to recognize the drive.

[man6ano]

Any ideas on this. I'm stumped, but really need to get this running