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Hard drive not listed arrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!
Blackbird Rush - 11/1/13 at 10:01 PM

Hi all

Hopefully someone here can point me in the right direction.

I'm putting a new hard drive in the laptop and doing a fresh install of windows 7 ( the laptop had vista before on the old hard disk)

I have checked the new hard drive in my other PC and set up a partition so it's readable and is listed in my computer.

Putting it into the destination laptop and booting win 7 from the cd the set up starts but then when looking for the destination drive to install windows no drives are listed??

Looking in the bios the drive is listed?

Help please before I chuck it down the stairs and buy a mac! :-)

Cheers


Ash

mookaloid - 11/1/13 at 10:10 PM

What sort of Laptop is it? Might be a bios setting needs changing.

Slimy38 - 11/1/13 at 10:10 PM

Personally I'd put it back into your other PC and clear all partitions and everything else. Get it back to a blank disk, and then let Windows 7 do it's business. It doesn't need to work with partitions as it creates them during install, and I've found it works much better on drives that don't have partitions.

The next step is to make sure the drivers for the hard drive controller is actually part of Windows 7. I've never had new enough hardware to be in this situation, but I do know from friends who have tried solid state drives that it can sometimes need a driver to be installed at the right stage on install. There's a bit of a difference between the laptop knowing there's a drive there, and Windows knowing how to use it.

Blackbird Rush - 11/1/13 at 10:15 PM

It's a dell Inspiron 1721

I do get to a part of the install where I can load drivers , however knowing what drivers to use is a bit of a mystery as the drivers I got from the dell website are in an exe format.

coozer - 11/1/13 at 10:17 PM

You probably need to format it in the lappy so it teams up with the bios.

mookaloid - 11/1/13 at 10:19 PM

I had this with a Dell a few weeks ago.

It was the hard drive mode in the bios. there were 2 modes available - try changing it to the other one!

pmc_3 - 11/1/13 at 10:24 PM

There will be a setting in the bios to change between ahci and compatibilty mode

mookaloid - 11/1/13 at 10:26 PM

quote:
Originally posted by pmc_3
There will be a setting in the bios to change between ahci and compatibilty mode


That's it

Blackbird Rush - 11/1/13 at 10:27 PM

Ok but when I've looked in the bios there was little I could change?

mookaloid - 11/1/13 at 10:42 PM

some info here might help

Blackbird Rush - 11/1/13 at 11:11 PM

Success !!!!!

Downloaded a different driver and it worked, so thanks for the pointers.

Installing.........

Cheers

Ash.