Formating Hd

[Virtualbody1234]

Give us details. What motherboard, drive, etc. Is the drive detected in the BIOS?

It could be that you need drivers for a IDE controller on a diskette. Windows XP has a message at bootup to press a key to use those drivers.

[Raven_1210]

probully doesn't have those if its a 4 year old machine

[Virtualbody1234]

Originally posted by Raven_1210@4 May 2004 - 14:18
probully doesn't have those if its a 4 year old machine

Probably doesn't have what?

[Raven_1210]

4 ide channels because that f6 part is for sata drives or raid drives. or 4 ide channels all 2 channel ide controls can run on standard drivers

[Marius24]

im sure all i have to do is format or partition the drive, its what i had 2 do when i got my new drive (different PC) and it happened to this pc so i just used the recovery disk and it was fine. the other pc doesnt have recovery disks so is it not possible to do it manually?

[kaiweiler]

Originally posted by Marius24@4 May 2004 - 16:46
im sure all i have to do is format or partition the drive, its what i had 2 do when i got my new drive (different PC) and it happened to this pc so i just used the recovery disk and it was fine. the other pc doesnt have recovery disks so is it not possible to do it manually?

If your computer you want to format has a seperate recovery partition you may not want to format it anyway, as that partition often conatins all the necessary drivers for onboard sound, video, lan, etc....
a lot of prebuilt comps will have this and it is a pain to format them, you may want to try just removing the one main partition and creating a new primary dos partition and installing your OS on that clean, but keep the recovery partition if you can as it most likley has all your drivers you want to keep.

[lynx]

4 years old and it has XP on it???

Or is it simply that you are trying to install XP?

In any case, if XP doesn't detect your hd nothing else is likely to. You can do ALL the partitioning and formatting from within XP setup, but only if it can detect the disk. you don't need to format it first for that to happen.

Tell us what model the pc is, we may be able to tell you how to open it so you can investigate further, but I'm pretty certain that you have a damaged component.

Edit: I'm betting it is an HP, they are easy to get into if you know how, but an absolute swine if you don't.

[kaiweiler]

just run fdisk....

[lynx]

Originally posted by kaiweiler@4 May 2004 - 21:10
just run fdisk....

How can he run fdisk if it doesn't detect the drive?????????????????????????

[kaiweiler]

Originally posted by lynx+4 May 2004 - 17:17--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (lynx @ 4 May 2004 - 17:17)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-kaiweiler@4 May 2004 - 21:10
just run fdisk....

How can he run fdisk if it doesn&#39;t detect the drive????????????????????????? [/b][/quote]
sorry my bad, I thought he had that figured out and was now just figuring out how to format it, my mistake lol