Windows xp setup want reconize my Hard drive

[nihil]

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? )

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

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?

[Relyt]

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

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

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.

[hexadecimal]

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