Solved! Dv6700 wont see hard drive

AevnsGrandpa

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May 16, 2011
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Was given this laptop from a friend. I put a known good Hd in it and when I go to the BIOS I can do the hard drive test and it does scan the HD, however when I boot to a Windows XP OS CD to do a fresh load, it does the initial driver and such load and then comes up and says there is no hard drive in the system.

Ideas?

Jeff
 

itzdanielp

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Aug 23, 2011
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you need to install the SATA controller for the HD. Win XP doesn't include them in the install, so you need to "press F6 (I think) for additional drivers" when the XP starts running. (you can see the message at very bottom of the screen) and install the SATA drivers. You can probably get them off the website.
 

AevnsGrandpa

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May 16, 2011
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I will try that but I just reloaded another laptop with the same XP load CD and had no problems and it has a SATA drive in it so I think you might be mistaken on this.

Jeff
 

howardp6

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Aug 19, 2008
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Go to the BIOS and see if you can set the hard drive to IDE, Windows XP does not have native SATA drivers. The DV6700 does not have a floppy drive to install the SATA drivers and you cannot install them from a USB drive. You can install the SATA afterward. See http://mytechweblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/enabling-sata-native-mode-after-xp.html Why in the world would you want to use Windows XP anymore.
 
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