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I was building a computer for my wife with an older SATA hard drive that I had lying around, and when attempting to do a new install of Windows 7 on it, the installer says:
"No drives were found. Click Load Driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation."
I ran the diskpart command: list volume
, and it showed up as "Raw". So, I formatted it to NTFS and then it showed up as a healthy drive in diskpart. I also ran check disk on it with no errors. Windows 7 installer STILL can't find the drive. As far as BIOS settings, I have tried "Native IDE", AHCI, and Both AHCI/IDE mode (SATA slots 0-2 AHCI, 3-4 IDE). I tried all combinations... still "no drives were found".
At this point, I'm just scratching my head. Using the installation dos window, I can see and talk to the drive just fine, but the installer just doesn't see it at all. I've even written folders and files to the drive, and it still "can't be seen". Any help would be great.
Items of interest:
- Motherboard model: Gigabyte GA-A75M-UD2H - BIOS Version F5 (latest)
- Hard drive model: 80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380817AS (no other drives)
- Installing Windows 7 using a FAT32 formatted USB Drive, which I've used for other installs
Could there be another controller in the machine? I've had the Windows installer refuse to associate with the OS drive because it got lost looking at another controller for which it didn't have a driver. Pull the offending controller and it was happy. Windows itself had no problem with the extra controller, only the installer. – Loren Pechtel – 2014-12-27T12:26:12.263
did you clear the MBR? which will get re-written anyway, but you just did not indicate if you attempted that? – Psycogeek – 2012-02-18T02:47:50.007
1Just for grins try install from a dvd. – Moab – 2012-02-18T03:05:39.480
@Psycogeek I just did now, by running
bootrec /FixMbr
. But it didn't seem to do anything to the hard drive in question. When I removed the USB installer drive, and tried the command again, it returned: "The system cannot find the path specified" – Albert Bori – 2012-02-18T03:17:39.097@Moab I tried with an install DVD, same result. "No drives were found." – Albert Bori – 2012-02-18T04:01:18.373