“Setup did not find any hard disk drives” during windows setup

Yesterday one of my friends faced to a problem while re-installing windows on his computer. On the windows installation process just after the welcome screen he’s getting a error saying “Setup did not find any hard disk drives”. So I have searched the internet to find a solution and the explanation was, this happens when the hard disk is on a SATA or SCSI controller and windows setup does not have a suitable driver for it. There are few ways to fix this problem and this is how I did it.



First of all I have checked his BIOS setup to find a way to set his SATA controller to compatibility mode. But unfortunately there was no option for that in there.

Then I tried to load the SATA driver from a floppy disk. To do this you should have a working floppy drive and a floppy disk which is very hard to find these days.

Then I went to his mother board manufacturer’s website and download the SATA driver in to the floppy disk.



Next I have boot the computer from the Windows XP CD and as soon as the blue screen appears I pressed the F6 key on the keyboard. Remember this is the first blue screen to appear and you will see the prompt at bottom that says "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or Raid driver". You only have a few seconds to react to this prompt.



On next screen you have to press S to load drivers. Then it allows me to enter the floppy disk in to the drive. I have inserted the floppy in to the drive and press enter key.



Then I can choose my SATA driver from a list that appears on the screen. Just after choosing the drivers press enter key to continue the setup.

Then the normal windows setup will start once again.