Mass Storage Driver - Vista installation

Ryan111 · 21 Sep 2011 at 22:31

My next door neighbour has a Compaq Presario A900 series (A961EM to be exact)
He bought it to me and told me it kept freezing and that it was getting worse. So I took a look, ran some tests and found that the HDD was failing. ANyway, sure enough a day later the HDD died completely and kept looping the boot.

I purchased a new (second hand) hard drive from the forums and installed it (checked it first and all is well) and then realised that he doesnt have any disks for it because the recovery 'disk' was on a partition on the HDD. Great. Anyway, I put my Vista 32bit disk in his PC (exact same OS so I thought it would be okay) all is well until it searches for the HDD and says no drives found.

Anyone know how I can get around this/where I can find the correct drivers to install Vista on this machine?

THanks

Stormster · 22 Sep 2011 at 00:02

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...en&cc=uk&dlc=en&sw_lang=&product=3752587#N409 has all the drivers and software etc.

Have you checked the BIOS to see if the drive is set to IDE mode or AHCI mode? Think it needs to be the latter..

Ryan111 · 22 Sep 2011 at 00:48

I copied all of 'storage' drivers from there to a 2GB memory stick and clicked "load drivers" and selected the memory stick. But it fails to find any drivers.

Should it be set to IDE or ACHI. I think it is ACHI now

Django x2 · 22 Sep 2011 at 01:26

set it to ide for install, then, once everything is installed and updated, change back to ACHI

Ryan111 · 22 Sep 2011 at 12:10

I dont have the option to change it to IDE though

Django x2 · 22 Sep 2011 at 14:21

what option do you have? Also, where is the other drive from and what is it formatted as?

It might be worth attaching the drive as a USB slave to a working machine and use diskpart to clean to 0 and format as NTFS.

Ryan111 · 23 Sep 2011 at 13:27

It was formatted as NTFS, I attached it to my PC and deleted the partition. So it is now unformatted space.