Hard Drive issue

Hi,
I'm currently got an issue with my hard drive and not sure on what i should do to sort this problem out. The hard drive itself works i can read and write onto the hard drive ok without problems. the part which i start to get problems with it is if i go into bios or try to install windows from a different cd other than the restore disk i got with the computer, in the partition manager in the set up it says that my hard drives are not found and so i cannot install windows. in bios it says that the hard drives are not installed, but i do not understand how this can be if i can read and write onto the hard drive with ordinary data like a text document then why is it saying that my hard drives are not installed on the system and why wont it let me create, format partitions?
Please can you advise.
Thanks

If there anything important on it i'd recommend you start backing it up, the HD may be dying.

Mmm, serial ATA by any chance? Do you have RAID as well?

This caused me a lot of grief.

It sounds like your PC has a SATA hard drive. The standard Windows XP installation CD does not see these drives (never seen it detect one yet) and instead requires a driver disk to be inserted during the installation phase.

In the early phase of XP installation it says on the status bar "Press F6 if you need to install a 3rd party SCSI or RAID Driver" - Here is where you install your SATA driver.

If you go to the manufacturer of you motherboard you will be able to download a SATA driver.

The BIOS on your PC will probably not show your drive under IDE and instead see if its listed under RAID.

the hard drive i have is a seagate barracuda 7200.7 200gb not sure of the inferface it is using though think it is Ultra ATA, cant say for sure. I've try the f6 key during installation doesn't find anything, i'll try and find the drive for sata.

I don't think there is a problem - it is as "Qube" says - Serial ATA (combined with RAID) has been a pain for me in this area.

First you need to identify exactly what type of drive it is and also whether you have RAID as well.

just got home to check the hard drive is a sata interface and on start up it is listed under non-raid. under the raid option it says none. any more advise?

What Qube said: You need to get the SATA drivers from the system manufacturer, put them on a floppy, hammer F6 during the XP installation and it will ask you for the floppy with drivers. After loading those, it will see the harddrives just fine & can install to them without problems.

Or you could use your manufacturer-supplied restore CD of course... Note that that will likely zap all your files on the HD as well, so don't go that route unless you have a backup of everything you need.

You definately need a driver disk to install XP (other than your restore CD). It is all correct as you say. One hard drive does not make a RAID - if you had 2 SATA drives in your PC then you could change the BIOS setting to enable RAID 0 or 1.

But for now forget all about RAID, its not important for what you have. You'll need to go the motherboards manufaturers website or your PC manufacturers website and get the SATA driver for installing XP.

ok, just went into bios again says in one of the sections that it has 1 sata and one pata drive, does this mean anything? cant find any driver for the sata drive, i'm getting very confused.

my motherboard is msi, but there are to many different drivers, any advice on the one i need to get? i cant tell from the descriptions.
Thanks

the one that says serial ata driver..........................

We'll assume you MSI motherboard is based on the nForce3 chipset - click here

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/driver/dvr/spt_dvr_list.php?part=1&kind=4&CHIP=4&COM=4

from there you can download the sata driver - If not use the drop down box in the "framework" window and select which chipset your motherboard is based upon.

You can't go wrong :)

The 'pata' drive is the old-style ATA (after serial ata came out, they retra actively renamed the standard ATA to Parallel ATA, or PATA)

good chance that the PATA drive listed is your optical drive (CD/DVD)

ok, i got the driver, i needed the via technology driver, just a last question, will this sort the bios issue of it saying the hard drive is not installed? and if i install a new version of windows will that mess up the restore cd i got with the pc as it takes the windows image off the pc first? in bios it says that my primary ide is not installed and the same with the secondary ide slave.
Thanks

Depending on the BIOS, it may list SATA devices in an entirely seperate location from the old fashioned (P)ATA/IDE ones, or possible not at all.

'primary' and 'secondary' IDE only describe which IDE controller they're hooked up to, and the master/slave is a somewhat arbitrary setting as well. You can boot a system just fine from a secondary slave for that matter. Just traditionally your main boot device is your primary master, but that's not the only thing that works.

ok thanks for the help.