Problem installing OS on dell xps 600 no hard drive found

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bufodr_T

Supreme [H]ardness
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Got a quick question for all you [H]'s. Putting a new harddrive in my xps 600. Doing the usual boot from cd. Begins install. When in comes to the screen where you choose the drive to install the os on it says there is no hard drive to install on. Yet, when you go to the bios, it shows it as it should being a 160 seagate drive. Any idears to whats up? Install the old drive i took out and boots windows vista fine.
SPECS.
xps 600.
pentium d 840@ 3.6
2 gig ddr2
dell nforce 4 sli mobo.
 
Sounds like a classic "need to install storage controller drivers" issue to me. F6 with Windows XP, not familiar with Vista and how it handles that sort of thing.
 
Vista can take the driver on CD, USB flash drive or floppy. You need to place the nforce4 SLI disk controller driver on one of those and load it during setup.

You can use disk cloning software to move the old Windows installation to the new hard drive. I like older versions of Ghost and I still use Ghost 2002 (motherboard freebie FTW).
 
no you don't need to install controller drivers before the OS.
Start the computer tap F12 till the one time boot menu comes up and boot to utility partition. Run express test first. It should give you an error code of 1000-0146. You can still have a bad hard drive and have it detected in the bios. If it passes the express test run custom test on the hard drive.
 
Italix said:
no you don't need to install controller drivers before the OS.
Start the computer tap F12 till the one time boot menu comes up and boot to utility partition. Run express test first. It should give you an error code of 1000-0146. You can still have a bad hard drive and have it detected in the bios. If it passes the express test run custom test on the hard drive.
Click to expand...

I certainly had to for my SATA drives on XP using Nforce4 SLI chipset. Vista detected everything just fine out of the box.

The OP gave us info but left out the crucial parts like what OS and drive interfaces,
 
you don't have a dell computer do you?? I don't but I have done XPS tech support for a year now and I have done many many reinstalls. Never had to put any drivers before the OS. Its made not to.
I also have a raid 0 array with 2 320gb seagate hard drives on my custom rig and vista and xp installed just fine.
 
I have an XPS600 and had exactly the same problem. I am running XPpro rather than Vista on my machine, but same problem regardless.

Your question is answered by pxc.
Vista can take the driver on CD, USB flash drive or floppy. You need to place the nforce4 SLI disk controller driver on one of those and load it during setup.
Click to expand...

A point to note is that the dell drivers, which can be extracted onto a floppy and mounted caused a blue screen for me, crashing the system. It's quite possible that I was unlucky in writing a bum copy to floppy disk and ended up with corrupted sys file, but I burned the Nvidia drivers to the same disk and those drivers worked flawlessly.
The Nvidia Nforce4 SLIX16 drivers for your XPS600 can be downloaded from the Nvidia website by the way.

Helpful to let these good people, and for the benefit of anyone else who is unfortunate enough to encounter the same issue (and be fortunate enough to land at this extremely useful forum,) know if/when you resolve your issue.

Regards,
 
Dunno if i understood the question correctly, but you can slipstream the sata controller driver with nlite, just need the driver, your original windows install disk and a blank disk to burn your new slipstreamed install disk.
 
In the BIOS, there should be a setting for Sata mode, take it out of enhanced and put it into compatability mode

(had to do that on a few 1505's recently)
 
thx pxc it workd for me. First time i have ever run into this in the many systems i have built. Thanks everyone for your help. That is why [H] is the way to go.
 
Italix said:
I have done XPS tech support for a year now and I have done many many reinstalls. Never had to put any drivers before the OS. Its made not to.
Click to expand...

That's because Dell ships their machines with the SATA drivers slipstreamed onto the OS discs. So, the Dell OEM Windows XP disc will not require the extra step to install the driver, but a non-OEM disc will.
 
I have an OVS but purposely used the (most recent) Dell media disk for the reason stated by Scream and Fly. It didn't load the drivers. The conclusion I draw from this is that the Dell drivers are either not slipstreamed or they do not mount properly. The dell drivers (from their website) are quite out of date for the nforce4 boards anyway. I suppose there is a possibility that only an older Dell disk from the time I obtained the machine will do it - I find this hard to believe though.

Incidentally I used a floppy disk in order to F6 the drivers because, as my PC was essentially rendered useless, I had no means of burning a CD (at home, at that time.) I did have a very old laptop and a usb floppy drive though - which I was very happy about.

I'm not sitting at my XPS600 at this point as it is at home, and I am at work, but I am confident that there is no way to toggle 'compatibility mode' for sata. In fact there is very little you can do the BIOS at all in those machines.

Regards,
 
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