How to Solve XP Setup Won’t Recognise The Hard Drive Problem?

If not for the normal user but definitely for the technician friends, it is not an uncommon experience to see that the hard drive not detected while you are trying to install operating system XP on a hard drive, no matter SATA or the earlier PATA. You might get a error message on a black screen as “boot volume not detected” or “hard drive not detected”. The very next moment your suspicion falls on the hard drive as being a defective one or may be the cables connecting the hard drive has gone bad. Well, you might even go to the extent of contemplating a bad power cable connection between the power supply that is the SMPS and the hard drive.


I am not really saying that the propositions given above are not worth a consideration but what would you do if you see that even after trying the hard drive on a different mother-board and the same mother board but with a different power supply does not let you pin-point the problem? The hard drive works fine with a different mother board and with a changed power supply it does not make a difference. The problem is more common with the newer SATA hard drives.

The actual problem lies in the non detection or a corruption of the hard drive drivers loaded in the mother board usually with the help of a “mother board CD” or a separate driver CD which came with the computer. Look for the SATA/RAID Controller driver which will resolve the problem with the non-detected drive. Restart the computer once again, boot from the OS CD and try to install the OS on the hard drive and this time it should be detected in a proper way. One thing that I should mention here that if the hard drive is not detected during setup of the OS then it will not show up in the BIOS either.

If still facing a problem then call online technical support service provider and ask for computer help.