Member Avatar for marionffavp

I have a HP Compaq Presario 2100 series laptop that will not recognize the IDE hard drive that is brand new. It has been installed correctly and it is not being reconized. I am reinstalling Windows XP Professional on it. So far I have had no luck at all on fixing it. :sad: I am flustered and thinking about thowing the thing in the trash! The CD drive works as it will boot from a CD. When I try to Windows XP back on it, I get an error that says that "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer". I don't know what to do or where to go from here. This computer does not have a floppy disk drive, so that won't work.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.:sad:

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Two quick diagnostic paths to narrow this down (they require nothing fancy and will tell you what to do next).

First: check whether the laptop BIOS/Setup actually sees the drive. Reboot, go into Setup (the key is shown at boot — commonly F2/F10 on HP/Compaq) and look for a hard‑disk entry with model and size. If the BIOS does NOT list the drive, this is a hardware/firmware issue (connector, drive power, caddy, or BIOS limitation), not an XP problem. Before assuming a dead drive, reseat the drive and the caddy, inspect the connector for bent pins, and run any built‑in hardware diagnostics the Presario will offer. If the laptop can never see the disk at BIOS level, RMA or a hardware repair path is appropriate.

If the BIOS DOES list the drive but XP setup still says “Setup did not find any hard disk drives…”, it’s almost always a storage-controller/driver mismatch or an odd partition table left by another OS. For controller drivers: check Setup for a SATA/AHCI/RAID option and switch to “Compatibility/IDE” if available; otherwise XP needs a text‑mode storage driver during setup (F6). Since there’s no floppy: either slipstream the correct mass‑storage driver into an XP install ISO (nLite or similar) or create a WinPE/BartPE environment that has the driver. Make sure you download the exact controller driver (the plain i386/textmode driver), not just a Windows installer package.

Two final notes: older laptop BIOSes sometimes have drive size/compatibility limits — check HP/Compaq support for a BIOS update (follow their instructions carefully). And if the disk contains Vista dynamic/RAID metadata, clear the partition table (data will be lost) before installing. If is right about hardware but ’s disk works elsewhere, focus on BIOS/connector and driver mode first — that will save unnecessary returns.

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Member Avatar for goldeagle2005

Your sysptoms indicate that the hard disk itself is faulty. Check it on another computer, and if it doesnt work there, return the HD for a new one.

Member Avatar for DocDizzle

Hey
i'm having the same problem Marion is having. The problem is that the HDD works just fine. it's been working the entire time, it's just that when i try to install Windows XP, the HDD is suddenly not recognized. Somehow i think it's not the HDD, but Vista being too clingy...

either way, help would be nice still

Member Avatar for Spriggan

you could use a third party tool like a linux rescue disk wuth Qparted or Fdisk even to reformat the HDD and knock out Vista.

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