Seagate ST9408114A not recognised by Winxp Disc

[shadowman]

Hello folks,
              i am trying to install Winxp on a laptop which has Pentium4 processor and it is a Dell Laptop, it has Seagate ST9408114A  HDD, so far i have tried winxp , WIn7 and Clonezilla and BartePE , but it all failed to recognise the HDD, so i am beginning to realize if the HDD is corrupted i can't use HirenBoot CD or can i check the for bad sector : so what possibly could be the problem .
            One thing could be that it is a SATA Disc but then again it has a Pentium 4 Processor and i think it is a ATA HDD, so what could be the problem, i could download the SATA Controller and integrate to make the Winxp Setup disc to recognise it.
  So what possibly could be the problem,,,,any direction would be great,     

[4wd]

Is the drive recognised on the POST screen?
Or can you access the BIOS and see if it appears there?

If it doesn't appear to the BIOS then it could either be a cable problem, (power or data), or the drive is faulty.

One of these:



is great for testing drives - plug it in to the drive and then plug it into a USB port.

If it doesn't appear to the BIOS then no OS is going to see it either.

BTW, that model is an IDE drive.

[shadowman]

The HDD is Seagate ST9408114A and although it van be seen in the Bios but winxp CD doesn't see it, and on one occassion Win7 Disc couldn't too and it showed BSOD, i can't download the SATA Controller , just because their is none in the net: and it is a Acer Laptop not a Dell laptop:::
Any suggestion, if it can't be solved here, then it can't be anywhere...........

[4wd]

The HDD is Seagate ST9408114A....

As you mentioned in your first post - it's an IDE, (Parallel ATA), drive.

ST9408114A Momentus 5400.2 ATA notebook hard drive
Part #                         ST9408114A
Key Specifications     Seagate Momentus 40GB Hard Drive
Manufacturer           Seagate
Manufacturer Part #  ST9408114A
Interface                ATA-100
Interface Connectors 44 pin IDC

A couple of things to try:
1) Go into the BIOS and reset it to Safe defaults if possible.
2) Grab Darik's Boot And Nuke and if it finds the drive, let it run for about 5-10 minutes - long enough to destroy any existing MBR or partition table.  Then see if the XP installer finds the drive.  NOTE: This will effectively destroy any data on the drive if you let it run over the whole drive.

What model laptop?

There's also MHDD which you can use to check for errors, (if it can see it of course).