Hard drive won't appear in installation of Windows

johnnycrash

New Member
A couple weeks ago I was on my laptop which had windows xp. It randomly crashed and I couldn't get it to start or do anything so i put Killdisk on a CD and formated my hard drive. After that I bought windows 7 ( i was already thinking about it and knew my laptop was compatable) and i tried to install it but in the installation no hard drives showed up and it wanted me to install drivers. I downloaded the drivers onto a flash drive, no luck. I assumed it was the Hard Drive so i bought a brand new WD Scorpio Blue 120 GB hard drive SATA. I had the same problem! I fromated it to NTFS and to exFAT and neither worked! Someone please help me!
 
Go into your bios and look for an option to change the sata controller from ahci to native ide mode.
 
The problem is I don't know how to acces the bios on this laptop. When it starts it only gives me options to go left or right and select the different options to start up with its a Toshiba Portege M400.
 
alright I figured out how to get into the bios but theres alot of stuff about the hard drive but I can't change any options it was Built in , the model and online and LD0-0 on one page and on the other it says Built in HDD= Serial ATA Port0
Select Bay= Primary IDE(1F0H/IRQ14)
I can change the option Built in HDD from JBOD to 1RAID-0 and then below it says Execute Creation.
 
If there is no way to change it to native ide mode then you will need to slipstream the drivers into a new install cd or install them when asked to. Maybe you didn't install the drivers correctly the first time?
 
Well on that computer I have no OS or anything and the computer I am using now has the same exact HDD so i copy and pasted the system32 drivers to my HDD that it said in Device manager on my USB drive. I combed the WD site forever and it says they have no drivers becuase all the drivers needed come with windows. Could switching to 1RAID help with anything?
 
Should I have my HDD formated to NTFS or exFAT. By the way the way I am formatinf and stuff is I have a hard drive enclosure and I'm plugging it in to my desktop. Also should a create a new partition or anything on it?
 
Ok i downloaded that driver and another virtual Windows 7 RAID "something" and the problem is that their both executables how can I put in the drivers during the Win7 installation?
 
I imagine that there is a way to change your settings to IDE mode like John said, which is really the easiest solution. If you could post the full model number I might be able to give you step by step instructions on what to do in the BIOS.
 
I changed it to RAID in my bios and I installed the drivers in the Win7 installation and the HDD shows, when i click next however, it says Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. Thanks though for helping me to even get this far. By the way my HDD comes up as Disk 2 Partition 1
 
Alright I tried the Win7 installation again and somehow it worked but thanks sooo much for finding the RAID driver and helping me!
 
Back
Top