I am hoping that someone will be able to help me out. I am currently trying to install a new hard drive in a Gateway mini tower with an amd 700 processor. I have gone into the bios and see the hard drive, however after booting from the cd and trying to install the operating system, I receive the message that there isn't a hard drive and to possibly install software that came with the computer. This pc was given to me so I do not have software. I have tried to fdisk and partition the drive to no avail, I have tried to use xp pro and format the drive and I get the message no hard drive present to install to. Is there any reason as to why this or any other hard drive I have tried to use will not be recognized. Please help, I am really trying to get this machine up and running. Thanks in advance for your help.
Ok , so you have tried other HDD's to no avail? That says to me that you MAY have a conflict on the IDE channels. Perhaps it might be wise to double check you have set you HDD to master , and the other devive on the ribbon (CD/DVD) to slave. I know that is teaching you to suck eggs , but in my experience the bios CAN pick up your HDD but as its conflicting you can do nothing with it. You may have an iffy IDE cable , swap it out , disconnect everything else BAR the floppy and boot off a bootdisk and attempt an FDisk again.If this works then JOY TO THE WORLD!
