I have a Dell 1520 Inspiron Laptop, but this is very much a windows related question so I decided to put it here. Last time I reinstalled windows XP was about 3 weeks ago. For some reason the reinstall named my main drive D, and my vista partition C. I was attempting to fix this. Meaning attempting to switch the drive letters. I used these directions from this site Change System Drive Letter in Windows XP I followed them exactly and when I restarted my computer, I got to the windows xp login screen but it just stayed there. With no option to pick a user or enter a password. At this point I realized that renaming the drive letters must have messed things up so I reluctantly took out my Windows XP SP2 boot disk and I was about to do a boot up from it. But before it loaded the setup the following appeared "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer." Now I don't know a lot about computers, but what it sounds like to me is that in the renaming of these 2 partitions they somehow either both got renamed to the same thing or something else that the Windows XP setup just can't detect? My Dell warranty is long past gone, so I'm open to any suggestions. Please, please offer some advice. Thank you in advance.
Jus to confirm I understood this right - Before the problem hit you - You were dual booting like so - Main installaion - Drive D with Windows XP Secondary Installation - Drive C with Windows Vista Correct?
My laptop came with Vista. I did a reinstall with XP. Even after the reinstall, my laptop had a recovery partition containing Vista. So I wasn't dual booting, but I did have 2 partitions. One which I used XP and operated on, one which just contained the original Vista files. Thanks for asking! Hope this helps =/. Edit: Drive D was my main drive operating with XP (~140GB), Drive C was a Vista recovery partition (~10GB)
Success! I had to set my SATA Operation to ATA instead of AHCI. I did this by selecting "Load Defaults" under the Maintainance tab of my BIOS Setup. After doing this the setup recognized the partitions again, and I was able to install Windows XP. Thank you for your help!
