80GB HD not recognized in zt3000

I am posting this on behalf of a friend who bought an 80GB Western Digital "Scorpio" hard disk drive to replace the one that died in his Pavilion zt3000.

The HD is not being detected. Loading the Windows XP Home SP1a installation disk provided by HP, he gets the error message "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disk related hardware configuration is correct."

I don't think there's any problem with the HD physical installation, because the light for the HD does light on sometimes during the Windows install CD bootup.

Would the reason be related to an outdated BIOS or not having done anything to the drive using an official disk partitioning or related disk from Western Digital?

 

The HD light lights up for CD access on at least some other HP notebooks.

I'm not familiar with that particular model but on the zv5000 series there's an adaptor that you have to remove from the old HD's IDE connector and move to the new one. Did you see anything like that?

 

I'm not familiar with the BIOS of the notebook but it should indicate if there is a hard disk installed. If the BIOS detects it as physically available, then find a way to format the drive manually.

If you have a floppy drive, booting from it with a diskette will reveal much more info than WinXP's setup. I absolutely always keep a Win98 boot disk near my computers for emergency sitations.