Posted by DJcreamz
Once upon a time along log time ago in a Kitchen not to far from Luton lived a young man, He had a pc that was having problems and he decided to reinstall windows xp. After going through the install process he found he had no driver cd for his motherboard after searching the internet for new drivers he became weary at installing new ones because of the risks involved.
Then the not so bright young man found a folder on c: drive ladled DRIVERS. This folder held all the drivers he required and after installing and rebooting everything worked except the sound, he tried to reinstall the sound drivers again but no luck (the sound card is on the motherboard) so i found the latest nforce4 drivers installed them and restarted.
The pc booted and got to the windows loading screen and froze the hard drive light flickered on constantly, he left it for 15 minutes but nothing so he decided to reboot again, it started to load and suddenly came up with a screen saying “ please insert system disk and press enter” so i entered the cd in to the drive and rebooted the xp set up went thought the motions of loading the drivers then to my horror informed me i have no hard disks and to press f6 to restart.
What on earth have i done?? how can i do anything if i cant see my hard drive ?? anyone know what the situation is and if there is any light at the end of the rather dark tunnel
Posted by DJcreamz
anyone
Posted by jagger2k
just format the drive and try re-installing windows again. normally does the trick for me, are you using a recovery disk or just a windows xp setup disk?
Posted by DJcreamz
How can i format the drive when its not detected ?? its a recovery disk but it is basicly just winxp
Posted by jagger2k
whats the make and model of your system?
[ This Message was edited by: jagger2k on 2005-05-03 10:30 ]
Posted by batesie
The joys of microsoft...
Posted by DJcreamz
Its a Mesh, i belive after installing the MB drivers its some how lost the SATA connection i think i will cry
Posted by jagger2k
it only sounds like a software problem so it should be ok, urm....so what does it say as soon as you put the disks in a power up? u got a startup disk?
Posted by DJcreamz
Well if i dont put the disk in then it tells me to put one in and press enter.
If i do then it loads up the winxp setup, it then gets to the next screen and tells me i dont have any hard drives, which is worring.
Posted by fatreg
i love pcs.
take it to bits, remove the bios battery for 5 mins and reset, and try and install XP again.
that should work?
fatreg
Posted by DJcreamz
Yer me 2, i also love mesh online support, their knoledge base has approixmatly 4 posts which is kinda unhelpfull. I shall try this as long as there are no bad things that could happen by doing this ?
Posted by fatreg
as long as you touch something metal before you take your pc to bits!! nothnig should happen,
jsut be careful if your gonna rip any of the GFX cards out etc not to damage them!
fatreg
Posted by DJcreamz
well do i need to just remove the battery or do i need to remove the other parts aswell ?? my only worry is if i remove the battery willl i lose anything else ?
Posted by fatreg
nah if you remove the batt for 5 mins it will reset the bios clock and then go into bios boot from cd and reinstall win xp.
jsut need to remove the batt but theres no harm in removing the gfx card and then reinserting it!
fatreg
Posted by PeterKay
A bit of an expert is our Fatreg.....
He can sort it for ya.
Posted by fatreg
hopefully!
dont go blaming me though!1
fatreg
Posted by PeterKay
Posted by DJcreamz
Ok so let me see,
I open case remove the bios battery, leave it.
Insert it back in and set the bios to boot to ccdrom.
But if it dont see my harddrive how will it allow me to install xp ?
Posted by slattery69
you say you are using a sata drive did you install the sata drivers there are usually separte to the mobo drivers as the motherboard drivers dont assume your using sata
probably not bt worth checking they are usally on a floppy which you have to boot from to install
Posted by spagnet
At last some really sensible advise. If you dont have floppy you download drivers from manufacturers site.
Posted by DJcreamz
Right, how can i install drivers when i cant boot ?
Posted by fatreg
it gives you an option.
if you need to install RAID/SATA press press f? now!
fatreg
Posted by Wazuki
Buy mac.
Posted by DJcreamz
i have a G5 aswell
so do i need to d/l drivers for the sata, or will winxp have them on the disk
_________________
If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea... does that mean that one enjoys it?
[ This Message was edited by: DJcreamz on 2005-05-03 13:59 ]
Posted by fatreg
you will need to DL em!
fatreg
Posted by DJcreamz
OK are all sata drives the same or will i need maxator drivers ? and how on earth am i going to install drivers when i dont have a floppy drive
Posted by slattery69
you wil need to get them from the motherboard site heres a link to another forum with someone trying to put the sata drivers on there system and the best way to do it
hope it helps
http://www.hardwareforumz.com/ftopic-41558-0.html
Posted by DJcreamz
I dont have a floppy drive so installing downloaded drivers is not really possible :-/ i may well be using that back to base warrenty
Posted by slattery69
really you dont have a floppy, cant you burn them to a cd and just change the bios to boot from cd im sure that would work.
though if you have a return warrenty in place you may as well use it as its built into the cost of buying themachine
Posted by Cycovision
I really recommend that you buy a floppy drive, they're only about £5 or so nowadays and they are still very useful, especially for problems like this!
Once it's fitted, boot up and go into BIOS. Look at the 'standard cmos settings' section and ensure that the floppy drive shows up. If it doesn't, set the floppy drive section to 'Auto' or '3 1/2 inch 1.44Mb'
Whack the sata drivers on a disk and put your XP disk in the CD. As soon as setup starts, hit F6 to get it to look at the floppy for the driver.
I really don't think there's any other way around it? Win XP won't look for sata drivers on a CD as far as I know?
Posted by DJcreamz
yer i have a floppy drive but its usb lol anyway i can use that ? i assume no
Posted by fatreg
yeah mate you can.
fatreg
Posted by DJcreamz
I dont wanna sound like a losser but.....
The prospect of putting something as simple as a floppy drive in my PC is something im not sure i want to do. Any other time and i wouldnt think twice about it but i paid £1499 not 4 weeks ago for this and i dont really wanna be playing with its insides
//edit//
ok ill attempt this with the USB floppy, now i need to wortk out what drivers i need lol
_________________
If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea... does that mean that one enjoys it?
[ This Message was edited by: DJcreamz on 2005-05-03 16:40 ]
Posted by fatreg
if its only that young surely mesh can sort it??
fatreg
Posted by DJcreamz
Well thats it, i have a return to base warrenty for three years, they arrange pick up and collection but this just seems anoying to me as i dont fancy being with out my pc.
I may try ringing customer support, but at £1.00 a min it scares me!!
_________________
If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea... does that mean that one enjoys it?
[ This Message was edited by: DJcreamz on 2005-05-03 16:50 ]
Posted by Cycovision
Yeah, XP does load a generic usb floppy driver upon setup, but I'm not sure if that happens before it asks you to hit F6 for the sata / raid drivers
As fatreg suggests, I'd take it back to mesh if it's still under warranty. You might need to b/s them as to why it's in the state it is now though, they're almost certain to try and wriggle out of repairing it under the warranty.
Posted by DJcreamz
Yer thats the other thing that puts me off its rather annoying as i have a G5 and a laptop both which have never had such problems i think i mite try the USB floppy see what happens and i will ring the helpline if that fails.
How do i find what ata drivers i need its a Maxtor 6B200M0 on an nforce4 board ?
Posted by dude_se
i dunno if you have go it working but try unplugging the hard drive then plug it back into the motherboard. may pick up the hard drive then. i know its crap advice but some advice is better than none, i find doing things like that always work for me.
Posted by Cycovision
You need to get the sata drivers from the motherboard manufacturers' web site, not Maxtor. If you don't know the make and model number of the motherboard, you have three options:
1. Take the side off and have a look (might void your warranty)
2. See if the mesh website has the full technical specs for your comp (it might even have the driver!) www.meshcomputers.com
3. Take it back to the shop
Posted by slattery69
agreed mesh do seem to have drivers available if you are a member which i am sure you will be having bought from them log into the download section youll find them in there i would have thought
Posted by DJcreamz
Right, the mesh website i have already been on and isnt much help they dont reallly have much drivers at all.
I have managed to get windows to boot and now only have one problem. I took fatregs advice and removed the bios battery, i booted it up again and walla it got to the windows loading screen and frooze but its never got that far before, so i rebooted again and tried to repair windows, no luck it tells me again i have no hard drive, so i got a nnoyed and went down the pub to watch footy, i then returned and decided to try the battery thing again but this time boot stright from the setup disk.
Magic it worked, but there was no option to repair the windows instillation just a clean installl, so i reluctantly done it and its all fine. Except i have no sound, in the device manager there is the multimedia sonething or other and its says no drivers installed, the drivers for the mother board are also that for the audio so i dont see how they can work and the audio ones not, does it sound like my audio card has gone tits up ?? its built on to the MB so i dont see why that would and nothing else is
Posted by Cycovision
Have you downloaded the nforce chipset drivers from Nvidea or did you get them from somewhere else?
If not, download and install them. Then, afte re-booting, connect to the internet (if you've got XP service pack 2). Go into device manager and find the sound and multimedia devices that aren't working and get the properties page up. Click reinstall drivers' and when it asks you, select 'search for the best driver' and 'use the internet to search for drivers' or such like (I can't remember exactly what it asks you!)
Posted by judge
Here's the bad news: USB FLOPPY WON'T DO THE Trick. I had a similar problem described here.
After pressing F6, XP does not recognize the SATA drivers disk inserted the USB Floppy, although properly recognized by BIOS. HOWEVER, after giving up isntalling SATA drivers and pressing continue, the XP setup automatically loads the sys file (the main driver file) on the disk in the USB Floppy. Unfortunately for me, the HDD was still undetected and there was no HDD to install XP on.
SOLE SOLUTION: Buy a standard Floppy and reinstall XP.
P.S. Microsoft sucks for not having NATIVE SATA support, even in the latest XP version (XP+SP2).
Posted by phsychomantis
yeah man i also had this problem and spent 2 hours to figure it out
winxp doesn't accepts drivers from cd drive .
Posted by fatreg
glad to hesr my advice worked!
to get the audio working jsut dl the chipset drivers from relevant website or mesh.
fatreg
Posted by DJcreamz
I have installed the chipset drivers and nothing, i also tried what you surgested cyco last night and it could not find any drivers :-/