Hard drive not found..?

Im trying to format a friends laptop, when i run his XP cd it all goes good till i have to choose the drive to format....it says that there is no hard drive, i ran a check to see if there were some bad sectors but there isnt. Hes running Vista on the laptop and hates it, so he bought XP....ive formatted many times before but ive never ran into this problem. Its a newer Gateway laptop w/ dual-core. Any advice would be great...thx in advance.

 

I would wipe the disk then load windows. Deriks nuke & boot works great.

I do hope you looked for XP Drivers for that laptop.

 

If the HD is SATA, you will need SATA drivers from the manufacturer before Xp can see it. If that PC was specifically built for Vista, there will be NO XP drivers and NO SATA drivers.

Vista has its own SATA drivers and NO driver disk is required.
You may be barking up an empty tree.

Many PC's were built for Vista...... Period!!!
You will never run XP or any older OS on them.

With just a minimal amount of work, you can make Vista look and act like XP.
I do it several times a week. Just did it again today with a new Acer Mini desktop.
My customers who are moving up from XP to a new Vista PC really love it.

Good Luck,
Shadow :cool

 

well that explains it then.....i have deriks HD Nuker...that wouldnt format it either. Now...if use a Vista cd, will that let me format and put a clean copy of vista back on this comp, it needs it pretty bad, wanted a fresh copy of XP but he'll just have to live w/ vista. Thx for the fast reply.

 

I have a good friend who is a software wizard. Even HE has had to back off of turning a vista PC into an XP PC.

A customer gave me a Dell XPS 400, with a ton of problems, but one problem was a messed up OS. I tried to reinstall XP by a CLEAN install.
Sorry, Dell would not make the SATA drivers available.
So I did the next best thing and installed Vista Ultimate.
That went off without a hitch.

Since then, the Dell motherboard totally shot craps and I've scrapped out the system. No big surprises there! :-D

On that little lappy, I'd try to use a restore disk to just put it back the way it was.
You didn't give any info on that lappy, but most manufacturers will send you a recovery disk if you ask them. It's worth a try anyway.
Get Vista back on that little PC and I can give you some tips on how to make it run better, and as much like XP as possible. We could do that via PM's.

Good Luck,
Shadow :cool

 

i've had this problem as well, a friend of mine wanted xp instead of vista on a lappy,
he droped the lappy off with an xp pro disk and a disk with programs he wanted installing, i rang him later with the bad news,
no problem he said, just put something i can work with on - so i did,
an hour later and he was walking away with ubuntu installed and configured and a big smile,

the moral ? - there is always a way

 

I solved the problem...i put on a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate, i did a little researching and made it the way that i want it, all tho i did find drivers for the SATA to run xp. The laptop i was workin on is a buddy's, so i didnt wanna use it as a "guinie pig" so i tried the drivers on my laptop (there both Gateways), and w/ out any issues i put a fresh copy of XP on my laptop....even tho it took 11 hrs for the format to even begin, nun-the-less....clean install. Thanks again for all your inputs