Qosmio g35 reload help please

Hello,

thank you in advance for any assistance. i'm trying to help a friend. his primary hard drive went bad. I'm upgrading the drives. He does not have his recover disk and I'm trying to load a retail copy of XP. during the first part of the XP install it gets as far as trying to detect the drives and stops there. stating that no hard drive are detected. This system has an odd BIOS. I'm very comp knowledgable for the most part and have to say that I'm used to a Phoenix Bios or sometimes even Award bios's.

Is this because of the RAID setup?

thanks for any help.

Mike

 

windows XP does not have drivers for most RAID controllers or for almost any SATA drives built in. Use the F6 key when prompted to load the driver from a floppy.

 

thanks for the reply. I have a usb floppy drive that I'm attempting to load the raid drivers from.

the install will see the floppy for the initial load of the raid drivers. then after finally detecting the drives. it again wants the raid drivers from the floppy drive and prompts me to put the raid drivers into drive A: and press enter. Well at this point it never looks at the floppy drive again.

any suggestions.

thanks mike.

 

I can't give you any advice speaking directly to your floppy issue, as I have never actually bothered digging up a floppy for this.

Here are the options available to you besides a floppy:

Switch BIOS 'mode': Look through you BIOS and try to find an option for 'compatibility mode' as appose to 'sata'.

Slipstream the drivers: Download nLite and use it to add the sata drivers to your XP installation CD, then forget all about the F6 method (this is what I do).

nLite download: http://www.nliteos.com/
A guide: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Windows-XP-On-SATA-Without-a-Floppy-F6-47807.shtml

 

That happens on almost all laptops. What you will have to do is slipsteam the drivers into a Windows XP cd using nLite ( http://www.nliteos.com/)
Follow their directions for slipstreaming, when you get to the screen that asks what you want to add/remove, just click drivers, then add in the drivers from that floppy. Hope this helps.
-Hep!

 

thanks for the quick reply guys.. I running the slipstream now and we let you know the results.

mike

 

that did the trick. thanks for the lightening fast support guys.

Mike