Windows xp setup want reconize my Hard drive

One of the guys in my battery gave me his computer to reinstall windows xp but before he gave it to me he had another guy mess with it, he used SecurErase to wipe the whole drive. Now when i go to install windows the setup want reconize the hard drive. When starting the laptop without a boot cd in it, it just goes to a blank screan with a blinking curser at the top left corner but you cant type any thing. the laptop is a HP Dv5000 if that does anything for ya if you can help please help about to ship off to iraq and he would love to have it fixed before we leave.

Thanks

Check and ensure the drive is plugged in correctly....

May have been removed for the Securerase program

Maybe the app fills the drive with 1s and 0s....and it became full???

No too sure about the app...but a new harddrive should fix this.

I experience unrecognized drives when the drive is full or damaged in some way....

Does the bios see it???

MLF

Yes the bios reads it and i ran the self test and everything looks good. The app is just a cd that will boot even if there is no OS on the drive so i cant uninstall it . i think he thought that the program would creat a bootable partition but it wont. so i dont know what to do

I have seen this problem before. I think it may have to do with the cd rom drive not reading the cd correctly. Try another windows install disk if you have one. and make sure the cd rom is working correctly. I had to deal with a computer one time that refused to boot any disk but would work fine under windows. Also make sure the cdrom is set to boot.

Hmmmm,

I am not too sure what an application like that will do to a drive, particularly a laptop.

1. Can you get into the recovery console? if so you might try the fixmbr command. Then try installing again.

2. You also might be able to get further with trying a repair install.

3. If neither of those work, I would probably grab a Win98 or ME boot disk (it does have a floppy drive?) and format the HDD first. Yeah, I know FAT32, but a lot of XP laptops ship with that file system anyway;) OK I have just checked and it doesn't seem to have a floppy. You may have more luck if you can borrow a bootable CD.

4. Is this a full version of XP, or some HP "recovery disk"? It should be XP Media Center edition.

5. It is quite possible that the HDD had some sort of HP utilities partition on it and this has been erased, if this is the case I would try to restore it. Does it have two partitions? C:\ should be 93Gig and D:\ 7Gig..............that is the recovery partition.

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.

Larry, this is a new (2006) model laptop from HP. It ships with Windows Media Edition 2005, but I would bet it is not the full retail or OEM version. It will be an HP version, and is effectively a "recovery disk".

If this is the case then it is probably looking for two partitions:

c:\ = 93GB
d:\ = 7GB

This is inspired guesswork because I have never worked on this particular model, but I have encountered the same on other machines when trying to replace the HDD. The recovery disk doesn't find the partitions it expects so it doesn't recognise the HDD.

Securerase will overwrite partitions as well as data. Hopefully it does not overwite the MBR, and I don't believe that it does.

If I stuck one of my XP Pro disks into it, I would expect it to work just fine because I use OEM/Retail versions, and they are the full product. Because of this they do not expect any preconfigured partitions ;)

I have not replaced a HDD on a 2006 machine yet, as they are still under warranty, but 2004 and 2005 boxes had this sort of setup.

I think that my first move would be to try to partition the drive.

Good Day,

You must restore all the drivers and files that resided at the 0-partition (about +30MB of utitlities, files, etc). They assist if you will, the BIOS (ie stores the drivers for the CD's and provides the computer with further instructions) Then Windows is booted from the MBR at the 1-partition. The drivers and files are available from HP/COMPAQ. They are not on the Recovery CD.

cheers

Thanks for all the help guys, 1. nothing is on the hard drive the guy wiped it out, it is clean no partitions at all cant boot to anything. 2. Nope no floppy drive.

Its most comon that these cheap little programs just rewrite everything on the drive with 1's and 0's. Its a good possablity that becuase dells do weird installs that it could have damged the MBR. And since its a laptop and you can't get into a dos prompt that way I would suggest getting your hands on a win98 CD and repair the MBR. Aswell as format the drive and put on a partition. Provided you can get ahold of a 98 cd.

OK, that is not a "cheap little program" that the guy used.................it is not what I would call "expensive", but it certainly works (as Wolfman will confim? :D)

I estimate that it took 15~16 hours for the first pass, that overwrote the drive with zeroes, second pass would be ones and the third random ...........that would be basic DoD requirements, but I doubt if the guy went that far :D

My personal approach would be to dismount the HDD from the lappy, whack my converter block onto it and slave it to a lab machine (basically any desktop will act as a master system)

Then just format the drive and create an active partition.............

Problem is that the Dell recovery disk won't work............?

1. Partition drive as 93/7 as already suggested
2. Use FAT32 rather than NTFS.............I could be wrong, but I think that a lot of lappies still ship with FAT32?

:)

Slaving the drive is a good idea given your circumstance. But however you do it,

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Relyt

Good Day,

You must restore all the drivers and files that resided at the 0-partition...

They assist the BIOS (ie stores the drivers for the CD/DVD Drive and provides the computer with further instructions) Then Windows is booted from the MBR at the 1-partition. The drivers and files are available from HP/COMPAQ. They are not on the Recovery CD.

cheers

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They reside before the MBR. If you put the MBR in the 0-partition was suggested... you will not be able to boot from the CD/DVD Drive.

maybe you just need to load the drivers for the controller into winblows...

im not sure but i think afew dv5000's used SATA drives... that was kind of a pain when we were doing restores on comps at work.

just research into what controller you have and load the drivers onto a floppy... hit F6 durring setup to load your driver and bam!

You can see the sata drive i have on my comp but can not install windows untill you load the drivers..

Think Simple. Saves Lives :)