PC was loaded with Win 2000. I formated HDD to install XP home edition. When it boot up, BIOS can't detect the hard disk and asked for system disk. Then press reset button, the BIOS detect hard drive and boot up okay. What is the problem? The BIOS is Award PCI/PNP 686, 1998. BIOS type is AWARD Modular BIOS V6.00PG. BIOS date is 09/08/00. Do I need to flash the BIOS or upgrade the BIOS? How? Please help. Thanks.

What else did you do besides formatting the hard drive? Did you change anything physically inside of the machine?

well from what youve told me is that you formatted the HDD and boot up to install win xp it you formatted, and havent created another partition there is only unallocated space on the disk. so your bios will 'seem' to not recignize it when it realy does. what you need to do is open up your bios and change your boot sequence to 1 CD-ROM 2 IDE then boot your system with the xp disk in the cd-rom drive. follow the steps and the installation will help you create a partition before it advances with the installation. hope that helps. My Pathetic System ------------------ AMD K-6 II 500Mhz 384 MB PC-100 RAM 10 GB + 3 GB HDs 52x CDR/W 24x CD-ROM Soundblaster AWE 64 10-100 Ethernet 8 MB VRAM

Please read these posts properly before giving advice. He/she stated, "Then press reset button, the BIOS detect hard drive and boot up okay". Does the computer continue to boot okay, or do you have to press the reset button each time you start the machine? If it's booting okay each time, it may have just been a temporary hiccup.

180mhz, For your information, you don't format a hard drive, you format the partitions on the hard drive. The only way there would be just unallocated space is if the partition/s have been deleted.

I did partition first, then format HDD. The BIOS can't see the Primary HDD everytime I do the hard boot. Then I press the reset button, it see the Primary HDD and run XP okay. No problem when I do the restart. The BIOS see the Primary. Please help. Thanks.

Enter the bios and check that it has been set to auto-detect the drives. While you're there check the time and date settings. If these settings are not being kept, this would indicate a bad CMOS battery.