Unable to detect hard disks

[Marsala]

I am trying to reinstall XP home and because I got screwed by HP trying to save money I don't have a CD to do this. I got an .iso from a torrent and made a CD but when it boots up and I choose to install XP it says it cannot detect any hard disks. I ran the hard disk checker from the bios screen and it still won't detect any. Any advice on how to get this to work?

[Furtwangler]

try shoving another hdd in it to see if it detects that? unless im not reading your problem right seems like a good place to start. If it's a laptop idk

[Marsala]

It is a laptop. ; ;

[Gere]

There's a setting in your BIOS you have to change, I forget what exactly it is but it's some kind of hard drive protocol that works in vista but not xp. It's got some acronym that maybe has an 'S' somewhere (sorry drawing a complete blank).

[Isiolia]

You have a couple basic possibilities.

First, you may have a non-standard interface to your hard drive. Most of the time an integrated controller, whether IDE or SATA, is accessible from Windows setup. However, I've seen some SATA controllers that are added on like a second controller despite being in a laptop (and therefore the only controller being used). What you need to do in that case is load the appropriate drivers when setup prompts for RAID drivers and whatnot. You should be able to use a USB floppy drive to do that if your laptop doesn't have one otherwise.

However, since you said that you can't see a drive from the BIOS either... what might be more likely is that your hard drive is dead. Make sure it's seated, try another drive if possible, or try that drive on another computer, likely from an external USB adapter or something.

[levish]

Go into bios and disable AHCPI mode for your SATA drives (spelling might be slightly off), it does not relate to power saving.

Had this trouble already, also Vista will install with it off if you choose to do so again.

[Gere]

Go into bios and disable AHCPI mode for your SATA drives (spelling might be slightly off), it does not relate to power saving.

Had this trouble already, also Vista will install with it off if you choose to do so again.

That's the one, I can't believe I forgot what it was called.

[Marsala]

Go into bios and disable AHCPI mode for your SATA drives (spelling might be slightly off), it does not relate to power saving.

Had this trouble already, also Vista will install with it off if you choose to do so again.

That's the one, I can't believe I forgot what it was called.

winner! Thank you ^^