I’m struggling with a problem for a recent WD 320 drive my dad purchased. The hard drive on his Gateway desktop with a Pentium 4 failed, so we bought a new one. The BIOS install seems to work fine, though it is limited to the 137 GB of it. Going to the BIOS shows the hard drive. It’s cleanly partitioned and hasn’t been used before.
However, when trying to install Windows XP, both the home and pro versions pull up a “Setup cannot find the hard drive.” issue. And I’ve been looking for the right drivers so that it can recognize it to no avail. No other computer in the house has a floppy, so using those cannot work.
If you install the drive in a different computer, do you encounter the same issue? Also, if you connect the drive as a secondary drive does your computer recognize the unit?
The drivers you need are the Windows XP preinstallation drivers for the SATA controller in your motherboard chipset. Once you have these drivers, you can “slipstream” them onto your Win XP CD.
Do you have any information on your Gateway machine? Model? Motherboard? Chipset?
Nothing shows up in the Primary Master/Slave drives.
What’s odd is that we had SATA drives before.
However, I’ll take the SATA download suggestion. I’m working with a fairly old gateway, an atxstf model 700x, and can’t find the motherboard manufacturer or the drivers yet, but I’ll keep you posted.
EDIT: It’s a Lexington motherboard. Our BIOS isn’t the latest version, but I have it now, and will slipstream it to the xp installation disc. Will that solve it?
It appears slipstreaming is failing me. Put the drivers on, it still goes through like it doesn’t detect anything. I loaded the default SATA drivers onto WinXP. How do I get the SATA drivers detected with no floppy?
