Brain tickler...

[Jamie Nixx]

OK, so the new Laptop arrived today, its sweet, very nice, clean, got into the BIOS ok, specs checked out, it is what it said it was.

I knew beforehand i would need a HDD, not a big deal considering the price i paid, so i thought before i buy one, i will use my Bro's old PS3 40GB SATA HDD to test it out etc before i buy one.

It recognises the HDD in the BIOS but when it comes to installing Windows, i encounter a problem, it loads up the files but when it says press ENTER to install windows, it says there is no HDD.

Having already spoken to someone, he said to me the most likely problem was that the copy of the OS didn't have the correct driver on it.

In fact, here is what he said


Well, that sounds like the installer doesn't have the proper driver for the storage controller. The typical way around this is to download the driver to a floppy from the mfg website, and while Windows is installing you press F6 to supply additional drivers for storage controllers. Once you have provided your driver, it should then see your hard drive and the installation will proceed like normal. You may have to get a USB based floppy if the laptop doesn't have one.

The copy of windows i was using has actually been pretty dodgy, so this may be the problem, but i wanted to guage some ideas from the gen pop here, or WM :D

[The Wise Monkey]

That is a possibility, but I think that it is much more likey that the PS3 hard drive is formatted in some strange proprietary format that XP can't even recognise.

Boot into a live CD like gparted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) and use that to format the HD to NTFS/FAT32, whatever you want.

Alternatively, put the HD back in the PS3 and use their utility to format it.

[Jamie Nixx]

Looks like we were both right WM, i formatted it to NTFS on my Desktop, put it in and hey presto, it works fine, installed windows, and now that i am happy the Lappy works OK, i can get the new HDD.

Thanks mate.

[The Wise Monkey]

No worries. :)