hard drive

I pulled a SATA hard drive and had it reformatted, BIOS no longer finds it, (reformatted 2 times) diagnostics run found nothing wrong what did i do wrong? meisstupidmaybe rolleyes

 

Greetings, Buzin2.

We need more information: makes and model #s of the drive, motherboard, etc., operating system and service pack # - any info you can give us may prove helpful.

 

back to beginning: son's son lost/changed bios and windows password, result LOST , pulled the sata hard drive send to another son to be reformatted,, he did, bios claims no hard drive installed, sent back other sons formatted, still no BIOS connection, the machine is Dell (i know) Dimensions E520, and of course running nothing, do I hit it with hammer and tell God it died? :-o OS is XP , but of course XP doesn't get booted :zzz if BIOS can't find it what else can I do install different hard drive?

 

This Dell page shows all available drivers for the Dimension E520. Looks like that model has a floppy drive: you might be able to load the specific SATA drivers, even a BIOS flash that might enable you to see the drive.

What's the drive manufacturer and model? Reason I ask: some of the SATA software located on that page addresses "drive will appear not accessible" issues.

 

Caliban is giving you the correct advice. If you need to reinstall XP you will need the SATA drivers on a floppy. At the very beginning of install at the bottom of the screen it will ask you to hit F6 to install the drivers from floppy.

Does this mean you can't get into BIOS?

Where does BIOS say no HD installed? Is that the exact message?

 

maybe to much shorthand there, when I reinsstall the harddrive, I can NOT load drivers NO HARD DRIVE, so I go to BIOS, , HARD DRIVE 0 none<><>< HARD DRIVE 1 none, , :confused how can I make it find/load drivers if BIOS can't find hard drive, on which to load drivers OH :yum and this model has no floppy, only CD rom so it in almost like install a new drive in a new motherboard (I still think I outta hit if n tell God it died) thank people for you patients and forbearing I learned all this in school 15 years ago, , , ,

 

If the PC can boot from that CD drive, take a look at this:

Read through the entire post. There is also info about the original Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD).

If you can create the UBCD4Win on another machine, use Caliban's link to get
the drivers and put those on the CD, you should have a better shot at it.