XP Pro Setup Can't Detect Hard Drives

Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem. My BIOS can detect my 80 GB Western Digital hard drive and I can boot to it, since I already have Windows 98 installed on the hard drive, so that's fine. The problem is that when i boot to a windows xp pro cd, setup copies the initialization files and when i press enter to continue the setup, setup tells me that it could not detect any hard drives on my computer and thus cannot continue. I tried putting the jumper shunt to both single and cable select on the back of the hard drive. No effect. Then I took out my sound card and modem. Still no effect. Ran an extended diagnostics program to check my hard drive, and it passed all tests. Downloaded some freeware that i made a boot floppy out of to check my system memory (RAM), and it passed with flying colors. What could it be? I saw something strange when i viewed the test results for the diagnostics of my hard drive, because the results said my hard drive was a SCSI type, and I know (and even checked with the hard drive documentation) that I have an EIDE hard drive.

I've been stuck on this problem for months. I even tried an XP Home CD and an XP Upgrade CD, the former producing the same result, the latter giving me the blue screen of death on the initial reboot after copying setup initialization files, with one of those STOP 0x0000000000A type error messages. My motherboard is a KR7A-RAID, my processor is an AMD Athlon 1.67 (somewhere around there) GHZ, I have 1 stick of NEC-brand 256 MB PC2100 266MHZ RAM, a 16MB PCI video card, a network card, a CD-RW, and a floppy drive installed. Don't know what it could be. Somebody please help. Thank you in advance!

 

You probably have a HDD controller chip which isn't supported by Windows XP without drivers. This is also why it's reported as a SCSI disk.

What you need to do is to look up what type of HDD chip is on the motherboard, and download a driver onto a floppy disk (the unpacked driver can't be in a subfolder on the floppy disk, ie. you won't be able to browse to it). Then when you're booting from the XP CD you will se a prompt saying something along the lines of "Press F6 to load additional drivers ", press F6 (surprise) and throw in the driver disk, if you have the right driver it should load and get back to booting the installation. From then on Windows XP should be able to see your disk and continue the installation.

 

To further support what Lange has said, Please see MS article about the problem.

 

Thanks!

Thanks guys! F6 solved the problem. I used the floppy disk that came with my motherboard to install my motherboard's drivers. You guys were right on the money. Thanks again!