How do I get my computer to recognize my hard drive without the cd?

Question

It will not install windows xp because it cant recognize the hard disk drive. Help me out!!!

Answer 1

You don't need a CD to get a hard drive recognized. The hard drive must be recognized the setup utility (CMOS/BIOS). That is the little black screen that appears when when you turn the computer on. If the hard drive doesn't appear on that screen, then you have not set your CMOS or the jumper on the hard drive correctly.

If you only have one hard drive in your computer, then look at the jumper on the hard drive and make sure it says Master (or Single Drive). If you have one hard drive and have it plugged into the same cable as your CD Rom, then you need to make sure the jumper on your hard drive says Master and the jumper on your CD drive says Slave (or vice versa is fine too). Keep playing around with the jumpers. Also look in your cmos settings (Usually F2 or F12 button or the Delete Key on keyboard) as soon as you turn it on. Go into CMOS and view the hard drive settings. Make sure that Primary and Secondary IDE is enabled. Some computer have an Auto detect IDE device thing in the cmos too. Hit that and see if it reads it.

Answer 2

the first thing you need to do is to reboot the computer and go into the setup or bios and look to see if your hard drive is reported as present in there. If you just recently installed the hard drive make sure and check the jumper settings. Since you are trying to install windows. you will want to be sure the drive is configured as "master" and is connected to the main IDE channel on the motherboard.

Answer 3

it happened to me too. actually its about the mother board and the disk drive controllers.
you gonna need to build a floppy from your motherboard's cd. they have small utilities for this kind of issues just check it out. and while XP booting from CD I guess it was f6 I am not sure it can be f2 anyway it will tell you the key at the bottom of the screen. after you will hit the key its gonna take a while and XP will want you to put floppy which has the disk drivers. after that you will have your XP.
Enjoy :)

Answer 4

Do you have the jumper set correctly. If you are running one driver it should be set to either Master or Cable Select. If you are running two drives then the "C" drive needs to be set to Master with a slave and the second set to slave.

Next, you may need to enter the BIOS to be sure that the drive is listed. If not, not an auto seek for that particular drive.

Answer 5

Go to BIOS Setup Utility,(see more on how to do this at Hardwaresecrets.com:(page 2) http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/6 Go to your Boot Option, and set your First Boot Option to cdrom, then HDD 0,(or IDE 0), then Floppy,(if applicable). When your computer restarts, put the WinXP disk in. If you miss this window of opportunity, don't sweat it. Just press CTRL+ALT+Delete key's at same time, this will restart your computer.