# Solved: XP cannot find hard drive



## onedavester (Nov 2, 2000)

I am reloading a brand new HP DV5000 laptop with a Hitachi SATA hard drive. I am doing this to get rid of all the trial software and just have a clean copy of XP Home. The problem is that XP cannot find the hard drive. I then used a 98 disc and ran fdisk. It found the hard drive with no problems. I then deleted all partitions and created one dos partition and then did a low level format. I tried to re run the XP install and it still states that it cannot find a hard drive. I went to Hitachi's website to se if it had SATA drivers to no avail. I did find a couple of H/D utilities that test H/D for integrity etc. It passes with no problems. What I was hoping for was something like MAXBLAST or Seatools (but for Hitachi). Alas there seems to be no such thing for Hitachi. I also tried to boot with the 98 disc with CD rom support, ran smartdrv and then install XP from a dos prompt using winnt.exe. It looked like this would work, but upon the first boot, I get the BSOD.


----------



## onedavester (Nov 2, 2000)

What I need is SATA drivers for the motherboard


----------



## Doodaman (Jul 3, 2004)

I was having a similar problem with an IDE drive, and I finally got the drive working. After looking about everywhere I could think, I went back to the properties for the primary IDE channel. In the advanced settings, under drive type for Drive 1, the drive type was selected as NONE. I changed this to AUTO DETECTION, rebooted, and the drive was finally recognized. I would think there may be a similar setting for the SATA drive, might be worth looking....


----------



## onedavester (Nov 2, 2000)

I disabled SATA legacy in the BIOS. This initialized the BIOS to fool XP into running the Hard Drive as AN IDE. All is well.


----------

