Windows 7 cannot see hard drive during installation

Thanks. But if I set the hard drive to be the first to boot, then it will not boot from CD and hence the windows 7 will not be installed. What I urge is that it should first boot from CD having the windows 7 OS and at the first reboot during installation, it should boot not from CD but from hard drive. The actual way is that it should display the message "Press any key to boot from CD", so that one could press any key to boot form CD for installation and at the first reboot, the message "Press any key to boot from CD" should be left non-responded to boot from hard drive. The real problem is to generate the message "Press any key to boot from CD" that is not being displayed at my system during installation. The solution of this problem will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Dr Nasir Abbas

Hello,

Is this a Sata Drive or a Pata drive? From your post it would seem to be standard IDE, but maybe I read it wrong.

One thing to check in the BIOS is the hard drive mode. It is called different things in different pc's but for sata drives sometimes if you leave the bios in IDE mode instead of SATA mode it does the trick. I wish I could remember the standard name for the BIOS field. Best bet would be to nose about in the BIOS.

If it is sata, then I would download the sata/raid driver to a usb stick and attach this during the windows installation process. You would then load drivers as you tried to do, but from what I've read I think that's what you tried so I would so try redownloading the driver again. Maybe your download was corrupt.

Barring all of that, a final less clean solution would be to reinstall Windows XP on a very small partition, say 8 - 10 GB or so. Then try to install Windows 7 from Windows XP. You may want to create the appropriate partitions from Windows XP ahead of time.

I've had to call the dreaded microsoft activation line and it wasn't that bad.

If memory serves the computer creates a long hash of numbers, I think 8 or 10 boxes of 6 digits or so. You enter them into the phone prompts and then I believe they give you a similar set to enter back into the computer. Then, it activates. There isn't even a human involved. It really wasn't that bad. It was more difficult than "activate windows online now," I'll give you that, but it didn't take more than a few minutes or so.

OP's last post was more than 6 weeks ago.

Don't imagine you can help much now.

Thanks for trying, tho.

Good point SIW2!

It was funny though. I replied to a post on tom's the other day that had been there for a few days or so and almost immediately the person replied back. He must have been waiting for someone, anyone to answer....

He may be pleasantly surprised to get an answer after all this time - you never know.