Windows xp setup want reconize my Hard drive

[LarrySmith]

I have seen this issue before. I am assuming that the hard drive and cd rom are ok.
Make sure the boot order is correct and that you can boot from the cd-rom using another bootable cd. If you can then the XP disk is bad. If you can't recheck the boot order.
Does the laptop have a floppy? If so then boot from an old win98 start disk.
If you don't have one you can get one at bootdisk.com
When you boot from run this debug script:
:\>debug <enter>
-F 200 L1000 0 <enter>
-A CS:100 <enter>
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 <enter>
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 <enter>
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 <enter>
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <enter>

(80 for hd 0 or 81 for hd 1 )

xxxx:010C INT 13 <enter>
xxxx:010E INT 20 <enter>
xxxx:0110 <enter>
-g <enter>
Program terminated normally
-q<enter>
This will erase any non dos(like ext3) or dos partitions.

Then run fdisk and create a new partition table. Format the disk and sys it.
The 98 boot disk has cd rom support so if you can't boot from the cd you should be able to access it run it from the 1386 folder. Use the winnt.exe and not winnt32.exe and it should work fine from dos.