Why did I buy a PC!!??

Needed something a bit beefier for the shop, so ended up with a 2nd hand Dell Precision 490.

Asked before I bought it if it would support 1tb drives, was told yes. Bought 2x 1tb drives, PC delivered today, cannot get windows to install on either of them.

Want to install XP (no, Vista or 7 will not do) on a full 1tb partition and am completely stuck at the 'getting started' part as windows setup will not recognise the drives.

Been googling for what feels like all day and getting absolutely nowhere, perhaps i'm using the wrong search words but I cannot find anything at all to help!!

Any help would be appreciated!

I'm using a Dell Inspriron, I've recently purchased a 1tb Western Digital network drive. It would only show up after the WD software was installed on both the XP and Vista machines on the network. Probably no help at all but you never know....

Is the drive formatted as NTFS?

If there SATA drives which i presume they are then it may be your version of windows or pc bios thats not detecting them. Maybe your bios not set up to correctly identify SATA drives which would mean xp wont either.

if its a brand new pc that should not matter to be honest as it should be already SATA and set up properly. It may be that the Bios is not capable and the dell s/w installs the SATA drivers pre windows install, if this is the case you need to either see if the disks you have with the pc will allow you to make a SATA setup floppy which you then have to press an F button during install to install additional drivers. or download the drivers and make a setup disk.

Question is why do you want a windows install on both? if you already have widows on the hard drive the pc came with all you need is to plug in the additional drives and run them as slaves.

Don't know as the xp install can't find it!

Also.....When you asked if it supported 1tb drives did you say to install windows on them? or just support as in find them as a slave, cus they are 2 big differences when it comes to installs etc.

The big problem is its Dell....there so custom its unreal.

Only want to install XP on one drive and use the other for storage.

It came with an 80GB drive which is just too small for the way I want to configure it.

No disks came with it as it's 2nd hand, and not 100% sure which driver I need for the SATA controller yet.

I don't know if this is necessary, but this is what I would do:

Examine and check the disk with Acronis Disk Director (or similar program) on a bootable CD (no installed operating system necessary to run). Try formating the 1TB drive to NTFS. Try installing XP again. Failing that, partition the disk with a smallish partition for XP. No one needs 1TB for Windows.

Oh dear then you may have a problem, the 80gig drive may not be sata and if it isnt then chances are the bios may not support it, older motherboards even tho they have the sata ports dont have the support in the bios, generally what happens if you buy a motherboard it comes with a device driver disk. on that disk is a little program that makes a sata device floppy for during the windows install which allows windows then to recognise sata and the drives your trying to install. Windows itself will recognise them after an install but not during. without knowing exactly what you have i cant help too much but this does sound like the case to me.

Options are, vista or windows 7, or running them slave from the original one.

Also can i ask, why has it got to be xp?

This machine does support SATA, but you may need to enable it in the bios. You will also need to install SP2.

Look in the BIOS then see if there are any jumpers which need setting.

To see if it recognises the drives plug them in and boot up with the original 80G system disk. Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools,Computer Management,Storage, Disk Management, and see if they come up there.
It is probably because they are unformatted.
Hopefully they will show up in the disk management menu and you should be able to select them and format them. I can't remember off the top of my head but you may have to select them and thr right click menu has some obscure command like "make partition active" before you can format it.
Once formatted you should be ok.
Good luck

Was thinking about that so thank you for writing it down, save me the trouble ^^

If you have another machine, you could download a copy of Ubuntu. Boot from CD and use the partition tools on there to setup progessively smaller partitions until windows recognises them. It'll also prove whether the motherboard will detect the drives :winks:

If the TB HD`s are external,they aren`t going to be "C" drive.I`ve got a load of Seagate 1TB externals and they all work fine on all my pc`s as "plug and play"...and 3 of the 4 are Dell...using an Inspiron640m right now and this thing has recently had a new HD and Whinedows Xp installed.

Nic