Dell E6400 - Problem With Diskpart - Hd No Longer Recognized

Dell E6400 Hard Disk using DISKPART originally showed C: – 149 Gb and D: – 14 Gb for a total of 163Gb.

Owner used DISKPART to Clean and Delete the Partitions prior to reinstall of Win XP OS.

I wasn’t there so not sure how all that went.

Now, I’m trying to reinstall Win XP and it appears that the E6400 cannot detect the Hard Drive.

Running the install from USB – I get the message:

“Setup has recognized the following mass storage devices in your computer: <none>”

Quit the reinstall and rebooted and starting with F2 - BIOS Setup – Settings – General – System Information shows “Primary Hard Drive = 160 GB HDD”

Hard Drive is there but the Win XP install doesn’t recognize it?

Can I get some guidance on how to run DISKPART from the USB and get the Hard Drive configured to continue with the OS reinstallation?

How to exit the Win XP installation to get to the Command Prompt to run DISKPART from the USB?

First time doing this so Thanks In Advance For Your Help!

 

You need to load a storage driver so the installer can see the drive.
Go to Dell's support and Driver page - there are different versions - XP and XPx64.
Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver

F6 Method (During Setup):

• Obtain the text-mode SATA/RAID driver for your motherboard/controller.
• Copy the driver files to a floppy disk. (USB)
• Boot from the Windows XP CD and immediately press F6 when prompted to load third-party SCSI or RAID drivers.
• Follow the on-screen instructions to select and load the driver.

 

Thanks for your reply.
I have the Driver TXTSETUP.OEM and the Diver Load process is locked in to looking at a diskette, but I do not have an A: drive on the laptop.
Message is:
'Setup cannot install hardware components provided by a hardware manufacturer because there are no floppy disk drives in your computer'.
Is there a way to direct the installation to look at the USB which is C: in this case?

 

Or can the TXTSETUP.OEM file be positioned on the USB so that it can be found/accessed during the F6 Load a Driver process?

 

Just the txt oem? That will not do, you need the inf, sys and cat files.
Sorry it has been a while since XP so as for the ability to look elsewhere for the drives (beside A) I'm not sure, "modern" OSes do have that option.
The "easy" way would be to slipstream them into the install with nLite.

Bypasses the need to load a driver later.
https://www.nliteos.com/

 

If the disk partitions were deleted, and then not marked "active" after, they will not show up either. You can use diskpart to boot into and see if set active or not. If not use it to set them active.