Hi everybody,
I am having quite a problem with my new laptop HPdv1625. It came with win XP home and I wanted to intall XP pro.
First thing I did was to burn the recovery DVD's and then proceed to XP installation. Turns out that when after loading all the installation files from the XP cd it gives me an error saying that there are no hard drives where to install windows. I tryed a few more times without succes, always the same error.
I had the same error trying to instal Debian Linux, I thought maybe I could format everything from linux cd and then install Win but it didn't see the hard drive either.
Nevertheless if i run FDISK then I am able to see all the partitions on the hard drive, same as when I boot it from the recovery cd. It is like the hard drive becomes invisible when trying to install a different OS.
The computer doesn't have a floppy so I can't boot it from a win98 disk in order to format the hole thing.
Anyone has any idea about how can I make the hard drive "visible" in order to finally install XP Pro??

You will have to get Pro SP2.

I had problems installing xp pro (first edition) on my machine (built it my self). If You're using (s/p)ata hd (in my case ASUS A8N-SLI MBO with NForce4), the setup progam cannot format it without (so-called) f6 driver for the controller. Pro SP2 (as I was told, but never tried it my self) don't have that problem sence it came out later.
Anyway,I don't see any benefit for You to go pro if Your Home Edition worked. (Unless we're talking 64)