snipa911
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How to get windows xp to recognize sata harddrive.
Hi There,
I just bought a dell precision 390 workstation off lease and was trying to load windows xp 32 bit pro edition. I booted to the windows xp pro cd and went through some of the steps to start the setup process. When it came to the part to partition the harddrive and format and says windows did not detect a harddrive. This led me to believe that there needs to be a sata driver so i looked on dells website and found the intel matrix driver that you copy to a floppy. I loaded windows setup again and pressed F6, but it didn't matter which driver in the list i chose it still doesn't recognize the drive. Does anyone know how to get windows to recognize the harddrive so i can load up windows xp. Thanks
Mike
I just bought a dell precision 390 workstation off lease and was trying to load windows xp 32 bit pro edition. I booted to the windows xp pro cd and went through some of the steps to start the setup process. When it came to the part to partition the harddrive and format and says windows did not detect a harddrive. This led me to believe that there needs to be a sata driver so i looked on dells website and found the intel matrix driver that you copy to a floppy. I loaded windows setup again and pressed F6, but it didn't matter which driver in the list i chose it still doesn't recognize the drive. Does anyone know how to get windows to recognize the harddrive so i can load up windows xp. Thanks
Mike
Frosty555
Go into the bios and see if there is a setting to put your hard drive in "compatibility" mode. I had a problem similar to this with some lenovo thinkpads.
I doubt it is an option on the Dell's, however their may be an options to set the SATA mode to IDE. If there is not i believe you will have to obtain a system restore CD for the computer, Dell should send you one out for free, they might charge you like $10 or something.
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I tried that myself and it didn't change anything. Keeps coming up with the same message about drive not found.