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neil82

5 Posts

15932

November 12th, 2004 20:00

Windows XP setup did not find any hard disk drives installed (Dimension 8400) - HELP PLEASE!!!

Hi Guys,

I am tearing my hair out here and would appreciate any help;

I have a Dimension 8400 and want to format c: and reinstall windows xp. During Windows setup I have pressed F6 to get load the drivers during setup but it does not work, Windows still cannot find the detect the hard drive. It is present in the BIOS.

I got the drivers using the Dell utility to create a floppy disk.

My BIOS settings are;

Drive 0: SATA 0 - On

SATA Operation: RAID Autodetect/AHCI

Any help would be gratefully received.

Thanks for reading

sawaddi

2 Intern

 • 

611 Posts

November 12th, 2004 21:00

Download the new driver from Dell and make a new floppy driver disk.  Then try it.

neil82

5 Posts

November 12th, 2004 22:00

Thanks for your advice - I have made more progress in the last hour than in the last week!

I now have installed windows xp - I had to change one of the BIOS settings though to get it to recognise the hard drive:

SATA Operation: RAID Autodetect / ATA

Now the problem I have is that I have a hard drive of 250gb, but in windows it only thinks I have 139gb!!

Where is the rest of it?!?

ejn63

9 Legend

 • 

87.5K Posts

November 13th, 2004 11:00

Is this one drive, or a RAID 0 pair? Did you use a Windows XP install CD with SP1 or SP2 on it?

neil82

5 Posts

November 13th, 2004 12:00

This is one hard drive - Maxtor 7Y250MO SATA.

I have installed WIndows XP Pro with I think SP1 - not sure how to check.

sawaddi

2 Intern

 • 

611 Posts

November 13th, 2004 18:00

Did you use the XP CD to partition and format the drive? 

neil82

5 Posts

November 14th, 2004 10:00

I did use XP to format and partition the drive during Windows setup, however it was at this point that I first noticed the drive size was being reported as 130gb rather than the 250 it should be.....

neil82

5 Posts

November 14th, 2004 12:00

I have just installed SP2 and rebooted.

The hard drive still says 137gb for C: Looking around I see something about breaking a 137gb barrier, but not sure how to do this.

Do I need to use any of the maxtor software - maxblast?

My hard drive is a 7Y250 Maxtor.....

Thanks for your continued help by the way!!

sawaddi

2 Intern

 • 

611 Posts

November 14th, 2004 12:00

Do you have SP2 installed?

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