win xp hardisk not detected on intallation
 

Dear techie geniouses..

As the above subject suggest the only thing got after running the installation was [ press F3 ] to exit :(

Now am talking about my brand new empty OS Lenovo laptop.

Since it came without an OS the hardisk was not formatted for any file system at all.

Now i manage to find a set of tools bundled together in a iso bootable, from a site Ultimate Boot CD - Overview ( I use the non-comercial aka free ver) It contains many many hardisk partitions and other system tools.

Then i boot this cd and start formatting my hardisk.

Now the hardisk was a Hitachi with a 60 Gig.
it was then been formatted entirely to a fat32 using fdisk, also after that restarted and ran couple of other hardisk utils just to check the fitness and health of the disk. All is fine.

However there is 5gig of auto preserved space, after i partition my harddisk. ( i do not know why) if i delete the partition the reserve 5 gig also will be auto deleted.

After all that i restart my box with with a xp pro and we are back to square one.

I also tried gparted, killdisk, among many many attempt to fix whatever the problem was still the installer could not detect the hardisk.

Funny thing is i ran ubuntu everything went smoothly, i even manage to surf on the net on X gnu, which is nice but i still need winxp right now, so any suggestion guys...

Windows XP uses NTFS file system not FAT32. Also the util disk that you linked to was for Linux or DOS and not for Windows.

If you change your boot order to CD first and start up the machine with your XP cd in it will partion the hard drive and format to NTFS. There shouldn't be a 5GB partion unless you make one. Make sure that all partions are deleted with the XP installer before you install. The hard drive should be in RAW format before formatting to NTFS with the XP installer.

XP can be installed on FAT32, but it runs much better on NTFS.

I stand corrected William. You learn something new everyday! :)