Hello,

I have a HP Pavilion laptop that had a corrupt os and I formatted and tried to reinstall. I find I cannot instal as the os cannot find a hard disk on the system. Yet the hard drive can be assessed through a USB connection on another system I have. I tried various Hard Tishrinig.

How did you format it?

What did you use to try and reinstall?

Did the laptop come with recovery software?

Thanks for the quick reply. I would have formatted using the feature in win xp setup procedure but my first intimation of the prblem was when Win Xp CD copied software and was about to reinstal new win xp and got a message "No hard drive detected on this system". I then removed it and attached a USB external holder and accessed the drive on another system I have. That showed it was o.k. So I formatted using as a local disk on my computer in the other system. The os to instal was XP, it originally came with Vista.

You can try resetting the BIOS to its default settings. Once you enter the BIOS you should see that option available to you.

Your laptop may have an SATA hard drive and the setup disk you are using does not have SATA drivers

So at this point, going to need to get an XP install disk that has SATA drivers integrated into the install so that it can recognize the drive
-or try to see if the SATA drivers can be found for your model hard drive

1st option is easier