Problem with HD Driver on installing Windows Vista or 7

Hey hey all,

After hours of Google searching, I've decided to come here and post my issue because I know you guys know so much more than Gateway support. I have a Gateway P-7805u FX laptop that I bought several months ago.

First, I haven't had any issues with my laptop prior to this. I was simply planning on formatting it and installing Windows 7 RC1.

When I boot up the Windows 7 CD and go through the prompts until I get to the "Where do you want to install Windows?", the Windows installation does not recognize that there are any hard drives installed on the machine. At first, it had the two partitions that were originally on it, but I deleted them with the intent of having just one large partition. After I deleted them though, nothing shows up, not even unallocated space or anything.

It says at the bottom: "No drives were found. Click Load Driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation." So I load the latest drivers Intel Chipset and Matrix drivers from the Gateway website ( http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/mydl.asp?tab=MY&os=Windows Vista (64-bit)) (chipset 8.7.0.1007 and matrix 8.0.0.1039) with all the drivers that are compatible with it, but the Windows installation still does not recognize that there is a hard drive installed.

I thought it was an issue with Windows 7, but when I tried to install Windows Vista instead, it does the exact same thing.

I tried contacting Gateway but that led to nowhere. Now I don't know what to do as I basically have a powerful laptop with no OS that I can't do anything with.

Any help would be much much appreciated.

Thanks,
-Ryan

 

Does the hard drive show up in BIOS correctly?
Have you tried taking the drive out and reseating it to make sure it is properly connected?

 

if you deleted the partitions then your going to have to repartition it using the hdd tools from the hdds specific manufacturer if you cant get windows install discs to partition it. alternatively you can try downloading one of the many free linux distros and partition it using that (try ubuntu live) make sure you partition it into the ntfs format though.

to save you the hassle the western digital tools does not work on the laptop because it cant detect something i dont remember what it was but it didnt work for me when i deleted my partitions.

if you have a desktop you can do what i did and connect it to the desktop and partition it using the western digital tools off a boot disc (you can get it from western digital.com if you have a seagate get it from seagate etc.) also u seriously doubt gateway would even help you cause your installing an unsupported os. basically unless its vista your on your own logic.

 

Thanks ryo for the suggestions, I will try them all out, as well as unseating and reseating the drive.

The problem isn't just limited to Win7, I think, since trying to install Vista does the same thing, unless it is Win7 that jacked it all up (which is possible).

I'll keep you all updated.

 

Alright, sweet! I downloaded and booted up Ubuntu and installed it to partition the drives. After that, I booted up Windows 7 and it recognized the drives, even allowing me to delete, resize, and format them, without any problems.

Thanks for the suggestion ryo. It worked great!

 

Just a FYI I have seen this before it is usually due to a corrupt partition table. Ubuntu just reinitialized and cleans the partition table. For some reason the Vista and Windows 7 installer skips over drives that have that issue. In some cases the discs fail to boot altogether when the drive is like that. I've seen that one as well.