Hello Brothers in Nairaland

I recently bought ACER Extensa laptop, i want to format the hard disk to remove Windows Vista to install Windows XP, after following the procedure to format it, it always shown "hard disk not detected", one of my friend told me that it has what is called SATA Hard Disk and i have to follow some procedures that he doesn't know to format it. Please my dear brothers in this forum help me with procedures to format this laptop.

Thanks Nairalanders[b][/b]

I'm not a guru but if you are booting from a Windows XP installation CD to format your SATA hard disk, then you'll need to press F6 when prompted to install additional storage device drivers. Without doing this, the text based portion of the Windows XP setup process do not load SATA hard disk drivers and thus would tell you that it could not detect any storage devices required for the installation to proceed.

You would normally have the driver for your SATA hard disk copied onto a floppy or USB or slipstreamed into your windows xp installation image. Regards

Hey bro SATA hard drives come with a floppy disk that contains the drivers (like every other RAID drive), but Laptops of today do not come with floppy drives, This is what you should do;
1. Get this Drivers either by download or any other method, but when you have it, send it to a Flash drive that your bios detects from the start, When the XP starts loading it's interface and says Press F6 to load a RAID driver, Hit the button, move to your flash drive and select the drivers.

2. You can also create a bootable XP cd that has the RAID drivers in it already, adjust some INIs and The unattended setup should make it easier.

3. Since VISTA is installed already Start the setup from within Vista OS, so it'll copy the necessary files for the setup, restart your computer, you'll see 2 profiles, Your normal Vista or the XP setup files, I think you can continue from here.

MS OS don't generally allow kickstarting the setup process for a lower edition OS from within a higher level OS. Like trying to install XP from within Vista, or 2000 professional from within XP, NT4 workstation from within 2000 professional etc. This would most likely generate a warning message "The current operating system is higher than the version of the operating system you are trying to install" - not in exact words. At this stage, you can no longer proceed with the installation process.

Also the F6 process is quite picky as to the location where it seeks the mass storage drivers, it always indicate that it is searching the floppy disk drive and there is no guarantee that it would look at an attached flash drive location (as this would most likely be assigned drive letters other than A, if it ignores the flash drive, be ready to use a usb floppy drive unless you have slipstreamed the drivers onto an xp cd image for which you won't need to use the F6 prompt anyway. Regards

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=414
Will really help you.

When lifting technical procedures or solutions from other sites, always ensure to give credit by properly citing your source(s).  Cutting and pasting bits from other sources in an attempt to be seem as originating a solution is distasteful.  It's indeed more honorable to provide a link to a solution written by someone else than reinventing the wheel.


I believe the thread originator and us all can draw on the solution as proferred from the complete procedures here:

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=414


NOTE where the document author clearly indicated as below

Please do not post these instructions on any other site. I put a lot of time into getting these to work properly. Link to this article instead using this URL: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=414


Also note clearly that this would only work for the sata controllers that were indicated as supported in the solution document, the thread author should check which sata controller comes with his laptop and might need to make adjustments to the procedures as appropriate to get this to work for him if his laptop comes with a different sata controller other than the ones listed.

Regards

Sorry I didn't Cite any reference, I think this was the source site the first time I tried it, http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=414 Sorry Kevin, Honestly it slipped my mind.

@palabus tone it down, I didn't call my self the author, last time I tried it, it was around November.

i had same problem over the weekend. u try to install xp and it'll get to a stage and tell u "Harddrive not detected bla bla bla "
then u'll be asked to press F3 to quit

here's how i solved mine.
1. use hiren't boot cd to re-partition
2. go into bios and toggle the settings of your hdd, look for any option u get to chang its attribute to LBA.

mine was a hp-compaq

@Onicastro

No ill feelings and no offence meant. Regards

anothe solution is to integrate the sata drivers wit ur xp to create a new xp the will see the hard drive,that is what i did to install xp alongside vista on my hp pavillion

Thanks Brothers for this it is really working, God Bless you all !!!!!!!!!!!

Thats great. alot of gurus in the house
I LOVE NAIRALAND

Hi all, if somebody reaches this post and still have problems downgrading Vista to XP, there is another excelent option at:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/resolving-setup-did-not-find-any-hard-disk-drives-during-windows-xp-installation/

I hope you find it useful.

hmmmmm . . .
Duet. 8:18 !!!