WinXP setup could not find hard drive.

These days new notebooks are equipped or packed together with windows vista. At the moment many still prefer windows XP because of it's compatibility to many software available today. Especially when it comes to Electronics Engineering and software engineering field which requires certain customized software to run. These customized software is very expensive and not Vista compatible at the moment. So during the formatting of the notebook, you might face the following problem.

You insert a bootable XP SP2 CD and launched into the setup menu. However the system can't find any harddrive on your new notebook. What is going on?

The windows setup did not detect any hard drives. This must be the SATA Operation Mode in the BIOS. Here's what you need to do:

1. Log into bios setup.

2. look for Sata mode. The default setting is “Enhanced”. This might be different if your notebook use different type of bios. Should you couldn’t find enhanced, try Sata Mode “raid”

3. Change this from "Enhanced" to "Compatible" or “IDE”.

4. Relaunched the XP setup. Then the windows setup will detect the hard drive and all of the partitions.

5. The partitions can be deleted & repartitioned as u wish.

6. You may now install the windows XP as the usual way.

Should you still fail to locate the hard drive during the WinXP installation, contact your notebook supplier. Hope this tips helps. Good luck.