Setup can't find hard drive...

Yesterday afternoon I got my spiffy new Dell in which will be my desktop in my home office. I decided to plop Windows 2003 Server on it since I want to setup several different things to play with.

So, I popped in my trusty CD, fired up the installer, and began. I got only part-way in when I got the dreaded message that Setup couldn't find my hard drives. Which is strange, because my hard drives are IDEs, not SCSI, so it shouldn't have a problem.

Turns out I'm not the only one. I stumbled across this post which helped me solve it. Here's the relevant bit:

 

Reboot your system and hit F2 as soon as you see the Dell startup screen (the options are F2 for setup, F12 for boot sequence).

In the System Setup screen, do these steps.

- Select Drives:
- Make sure your Diskette Drive (3.5 floppy) is set properly (Usually set to Internal)
- Make sure that "Drive 0: SATA-0" drive is set to "ON"

Go to "SATA Operation":

Your system proabaly came set to "RAID Autodetect / AHCI" - THIS SETTING CAUSES YOUR SYSTEM TO GO INTO AN IDE LOOP AND DOESN'T ALLOW IT TO FIND YOUR FACTORY INSTALLED SATA DRIVE.

CHANGE THE SATA OPERATION SETTING TO "COMBINATION"

Reboot - make sure that the boot sequence is set to CD rom before HD and make sure that the reinstall CD is in the drive. Setup will load, hit enter to reinstall XP. Your HD should now be detected and you should see the licensing agreement.

And with that, I was up and running. Thanks most excellent internet poster!