No Hard Drive?...
 

Yesterday I was hit with a fairly bad trojan, thankfully I was able to resolve the issue but it's left my computer feeling worst for weather. I've decided I want to go back to Windows XP rather than VISTA as it runs much nicer but when I went to install the OS I got the following error message:

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer."

After doing a bit of research, it's apparently something to do with the BIOS setup, so I went into the BIOS setup to check the hard drive and it said "Not Installed"...

This would usually mean that I have had some sort of a hardware failure, but as I'm currently speaking from the OS on the not installed hard drive there seems to be something wrong.

I have done a chkdsk which never came up with any errors and the device manager in the control panel is also coming up with no errors. I can save/edit/load programs without any issues at all.

I've added a picture here:

ImageShack - Hosting ::

You can see what I mean about the BIOS.

I've asked all my computer wizz kid friends, but non of us seem to be able to work it out. I've checked the connecting wires as well.

Looking for some advice!

Do you have a SATA disk or RAID controller rather than IDE? If you have no IDE disks then Setup will need you to supply the disk driver. Also, no IDE disks will be present in the BIOS.

Your picture link doesn't work, so I can't see the BIOS information you refer to.

NB you might get the same effect with a SCSI disk controller for which XP has not driver, but it is hardly likely that a mainstream PC would have such a thing.

SD

Tried doing it, didn't work for some reason.

The computer is on it's death bed to be honest; CD Drive is pretty much dead, no floppy disk drive (does anyone have one these days??) and the hard drive isn't being recongised.

Arghh! Computers.