Upon installing XP on new drive: UNKNOWN DISK error.

B

BKSinAZ

New Member
Upon attempting to install a fresh copy of windows xp on to a brand new SATA drive, I get to the screen that shows the drives/partitions that I can choose to install XP on to.

This window shows (4) UNKNOWN DISKS with small writing below "there is no disk in this drive.)

None of these four unknown disk can be selected!!

I tried 2 brand new hard drives. Both SATA.

The bios can see the drive.

I tried with and without the harddrive jumper.

I tried pressing F6 to install raid driver (not using raid) and that did not work.
I got message stating that setup could not determine the type of one or more mass storage devices bla bla bla.

I tried to boot off of the western digital cd and running the tools first before attempting to install xp. Same problem. Actually that hard drive shows a missing ntldr (or something) at times when attempting to boot off the XP cd. Replaced with another new drive.

When searching google for this problem, I find that many people have it, but no one seems to be able to fix it.
 
Install XP with only the target drive connected. Connect the other drives after XP has finished installing (power down first).
Make sure the BIOS is set to boot to that SATA drive.
Use the supplied SATA drivers when you use the F6 option. RAID drivers may or may not work. It depends on the controller.
Consult the motherboard manual on how to install Windows on a SATA drive.

Hope this helps.
 
Quick69GTO said:
Install XP with only the target drive connected. Connect the other drives after XP has finished installing (power down first).
Make sure the BIOS is set to boot to that SATA drive.
Use the supplied SATA drivers when you use the F6 option. RAID drivers may or may not work. It depends on the controller.
Consult the motherboard manual on how to install Windows on a SATA drive.

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...


Only one drive is in case. No other drives.
Bios is set to boot to CDrom first, then Hard drive.
If you read the question, you would see I tried F6.

Thanks for the tip on reading the manual......was the first thing I did, just before researching on google and here.
 
"I tried pressing F6 to install raid driver (not using raid) and that did not work."
You said RAID driver not SATA. There is a difference. Some controllers require a different drivers if your not setting up RAID.

"Bios is set to boot to CDrom first, then Hard drive."
There is another section in the BIOS for hard disk priority. Since you getting the "(4) UNKNOWN DISKS" window during setup, I would say you have some sort of card reader connected. The BIOS treats them the same as a hard disk. The SATA hard drive may not be set as the priority boot drive.

I still think you're having an incorrect driver issue, but hey, you've already tried that now haven't you.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top