I had to format my harddrive and am installing a new WindowsXP disk. When I run the XP setup disk, a message comes up saying no harddrive was found on the system. What am I doing wrong and what do I need to do right?

please explain how you formatted the c: drive. if you did format from with in windows, which should not be done that way, the the master boot record and system files were wasted. you might get into the bios, and see if theres an auto detect utility to find the drive. if not, go to bootdisk.com download a win98 boot floppy. boot with it a:\fdisk see if the drive shows up there. if it comes up 'no fixed disk found', open the case , make sure all cables are secure, and the jumper is on master pins

How about some additions specs.

Brand name systems don't normally come with regular XP CDs. Did/does this computer no longer have it's original HP software installation on it and you are using a regular XP CD? Brand name systems come with two partitions on the hard drive. If it still had its original HP software installation on it, did you format both of them, or delete the existing partitions and make a new one or ones before you formatted? If you just formatted C without doing anything else, if it still had its original HP software installation on it the original second partition is still there. If you haven't been fiddling with the data cable to or jumpers on your hard drive (if applicable), if you have a SATA hard drive and the bios has the SATA drives in SATA or SATA RAID mode, you must press F6 near the beginning of loading files from the CD when it says press F6 if you want to support a SCSI controller or similar, and provide a floppy with the drivers for your SATA drive controller. Later on when Setup looks for hard drives it will then find the SATA drive. If you don't have the floppy, the SATA controller drivers may be on the HP web site in the downloads for your model. If not, we need the system model number on the label on the case in order to find your system specs and point you to the right drivers.

Tubesandwires has it pretty much nailed down. New computers usually come with a hidden recovery partition. I bought a brand new compaq laptop, didn't like Vista and resorted back to XP. When I first tried the install it said the same thing about not being able to find a hard drive. In my BIOS, I had to disable the SATA setting and afterward not only was my hard drive found, but I could now see and access all the files on the recovery partition as well. So that may be your problem too. Good Luck, Internalrage