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i have an old 300 mhz comp that I was going to put win2k on, so I rebooted and let it start up with win2k setup, it goes through everything and says that windows 2000 setup could not find my hard drive. so i deleted the partitions and created a new one with fdisk, and tried again with the win2k setup and it said the same thing.... so i formatted with my windows 98 setup disk and tried again, same thing.



any idea what's going on? I believe it's a 40 gb western digital hdd. i'm REALLY hoping to not have to open the case on this baby, i'm sure it's extremely dusty heh







Exact message:

Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer.



Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is correct. This may involved running a manufacturer-supplied diagnostic or setup program.



Setup cannot continue. To quit Setup, press F3.

perhaps something similar to this: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309160 but it's a HP pavilion 6330, and i don't see a download on HP's site for the ata 100 controller or anything smiliar, doh!

man screw it, i'mma just put on xp

that link you posted is the start of the solution. a lot of people that had Promise ATA-100 ports had these issues when installing OS's. you should be able to find a better solution if you go to promise's website. my friend had one of those and he had to install his OS using one of his ATA-66 ports and then switch it after he had the OS installed. i do believe what you would need to do is get a disk ready and then right when windows starts its install it says something at the bottom like "Press F6 to load additional SCSI drivers" (that isn't verbatim, it's off the top of my head) and then you would pop in the disk with the promise drivers.



-syn

agreed, but xp runs decent on it, so problem solved

well, the first thing i'd ask is what is the partition of the HD?

its not a linux/bsd/unix weird partition is it?



no?

forget it!



but if you're just being curious, i deleted the partitions with fdisk, then tried it, then created a partition and tried it, then formatted it and tried it, got the same message in all cases...



i looked at it and it has an ide pci card, so i'm just like f00k it. xp runs better anyway

i've had lots of troubles with those ide pci/isa cards in the past. may just be your hd controller thats fuking up

we had the same problem (but with windows xp) - can't find hdd (no mass storage device).



it turns out we had some promise hardware, which the hdd was plugged into (on ide 3). We took it out of this "ultra133" port, and plugged it into ide1 (which evidently was an 66 port). Windows setup detected the drive fine then, and we went on to install windows without any trouble.



Moral of the story? Use the 66 way (ide1 or ide2) when you're installing - you can always switch it back later if you want to.



Hope this helps someone...!