Error Message:Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in you 1

[trigger753]

I have a three month old Dell Dimension 8400. 3.0 GHZ P4, 1 Gig Ram and a 160 gig SATA Hard Drive. When I got the computer I used the files and transfer (PC Relocator) utility. And had a bunch of unwanted extras that came with it. I'm having a Satellite Internet system installed and they wanted a clean install of windows XP. So I opened the owner’s manual and got out the reinstallation disk and the problems began. By the way Dell tech support's only response has been to say gee that's not right, and would send a tech sometime after Christmas. Anyway heres step by step what I did.
I boot to the Dell reinstallation disk. The windows setup screen appears and loads files. The next screen says welcome to setup and offers three options. 1-to setup XP press enters. 2 To repair XP press R 3 to exit without installing XP press F3
I press enter and the following message comes up. Setup did not find any hard disk installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected. And any disk related configuration is correct.ect. Press F3 to quit. It dose this if I try repair also.
Dell had me check the connections to the HD and Motherboard. They’re good. And debug the hard drive. No luck. Everything worked fine until I put in the reinstallation disk.
Any help would be welcome.

 

[jurgen36]

Actually I had the same problems with a few machines, on some Mbords you can set the bios to recognise a usb drive as a floppy drive, but regardless if a floppy is installed or not you have to disable the drive a: in the bios. Once that is done XP will think that the pen drive is a floppy and act accordingly. Now I know this works with late ASUS and Intel bords, I can not say if it will work with others. But its worth a try.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[alidabiri]

can you see the hdd in your bios?
you can get a floppy drive for about $10-$15 from anywhere. here's a solution that may work.
get a 98 floppy boot disk from

http://www.bootdisk.com

start your pc with boot disk in
after win98 comes up, enter fdisk
display partition(s) (if any)
delete partition(s)
create new partition
restart
format hdd
turn pc off
take win98 boot disk out
put xp cd in the cd rom drive
turn pc on
get into bios
go to boot sequence and choose "boot from cd first"
save bios, exit.
let xp install.