Hello,

 

I have  a deminsion 8400 and I resently wanted to do a fresh reinstall of everything.  Well after I formatted and went to install xp pro, I ran into a problem.  When you get to the screen that says to continue to install win xp pro press enter, I hit enter and it says that the system cannot find any harddrives.

 

So I first call dell and after lecturing me about reinstalling with non-dell disks, they decided to replace the hard drive.  Ok so the new one came and a tech installed it and it booted up just fine.  It went into windows and had a popup saying my keyboard/mouse disabled while it installs software and that it would take up to 30 mins.  Well its been 3 weeks and it still hasn't finished!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

It said not to power off so I let it go, but come on!  That long?  So I powered it off and went to install it fresh from the dell cds.  And again I get the same error as above.  Its funny because Ican still boot from the drive, BIOS sees it, the dell diagnostic sees it but when installing/formatting with the windows disk the system can't find any.

 

So I put a second non-dell (as in I bought it from a store) hard drive and I get the same thing.  So whats the deal, can I not install a fresh copy of my own XP pro disk?  I know the disk works with sata drives because I have used it on other systems to test and it goes just fine.  Also I have the two drives plugged into the 0 and 1 ports on the sata ports.

 

So my guess is that there is something blocking the disk hardware wise from the motherboard, or the bios is messing it up.  I will see if there is a bios update availible but I can't boot into windows and download/install it from the harddrive because I get that software install dialog :(

 

Anyone else run into problems like this?  I need help because its been almsot 4 weeks now with out a computer and dell isn't helping much as they just want to send another hard drive and that obviously isn't the problem here.

 

Also, I did reseat the plugs several times and even tried other sata ports.  Its funny, the system sees everything there when booting from the hard drive but they disappear when windows tries.