I recently picked up a gateway e4100 P4 2.8 ghz, 512 mb for 5 bucks!!! system came without a hard drive. I have tried three different hard drives in here and cannot get the system to recognize any of them. I can see them in the bios, but when I put in my win xp cd and get to the install screen, it tells me that it can not find a hard drive on my system. Any Ideas?
Computer will not recognize hard drive
- Thread starter greggo2
- Start date
2048Megabytes
Active Member
And if you can't find the option to restore your BIOS to default settings you can always pull out the CMOS battery and wait 45 minutes. That should put the default BIOS settings back. (Be sure to also put the battery back to its original place when your ready to start the computer as well).
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ok, I took out the battery and reset. Now I am getting the message "Primary Master Drive ATAPI incompatible Press F4 to enter setup." I did that, and under Drive configuration, SATA0, and SATA1 are Disabled, IDE are set to Primary and Secondary. Tried again and get the same message.
I picked up a SATA drive from a friend, installed, and got to the windows password entry screen. I don't know the password, and want to wipe the drive anyway, so I rebooted with a startup disk, to the c prompt. Now it won't let me do anything with the drive. Can't format, or even get a directory. And now when i boot again without the startup disk, it goes back to primary master drive ATAPI incompatable. I'm really stumped now.(as opposed to slightly stumped before.) Thanks to all for the help.
try slaving the drive first to other computer and format it. then set the jumper to primary and attach it to your board. you can see the instruction labeled at your drive depending on what brand is your hard disk in setting the drive's status. set the Driver configuration to IDE set to primary if your using this cable. then proceed to installing XP.