Resolving Setup did not find any hard disk drives during Windows XP Installation

If you have windows vista on a computer and you decide to go back to XP, you may get an error saying that Setup did not find any hard disk drives during Windows XP Installation.
This error happens because your new computer has a storage controller that isn't supported natively in XP (Usually SATA controller).

The first way is to download the driver to a floppy disk and press F6 during the initial insulation screen to load the driver. But nowadays not many people have floppy drives, therefore in this tutorial I'm going to focus on the second way which is slip-streaming your XP installation CD to integrate the storage driver.
Note:this is an advanced topic, so proceed with caution.

Creating a Custom XP Install
To creat a custome Windows XP Disk, you will need a program called nLite which can be downloaded from here
Once it opens up, click the browse button

Now it will ask you for the windwos instilation (XP Install CD) Select the root of the Installation and click OK.

Now, you will be asked where you want to save the temporary files. You can put this wherever you like.

Now, nLite will copy al the neccessary files to the temporary folder.
Once it is done, it will give you the version information of your disk.

Now click next until you get to the screen where you can select options. Select Drivers and Bootable ISO.

Now hit the next button until you get to the screen for selecting drivers. Hit the insert button and select single driver.
If you don't have your drivers, please read the instructions below on how to find drivers for XP.

Now browse to the directory where you extracted the driver files and select open.
Note:It doesn’t really matter which of the *.inf files you choose, because it will select all files in the folder anyway.

nLite will prompt you to select your driver. If you don’t know which exact one it is, you can either use Device Manager in Vista to find the exact model, or you can just select all of them. Just be careful not to select a 64-bit driver if you are using 32-bit, or the wrong OS version.

I would recommend including both Storage and Network drivers, as those are the most common drivers that are missing in XP.

Once you proceed to the next screen, now we can finally finish the process. You can choose to directly burn the cd here, or you can select Create Image to create an ISO file that you can burn to a CD using whatever burning tool you have.

Note: If you chose to create an ISO, make sure to use the “Make ISO” button before you click Next.

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At this point you can burn the ISO image to a CD, and then start your XP installation process.

Finding Drivers for XP

The best place to search for drivers for your hardware is at the manufacturer’s support website. The only problem is that almost every manufacturer seems to distribute their drivers in floppy disk image form.

We can still extract the drivers using an application called WinImage. Let’s run through a quick example… Here you can see the Intel SATA controller driver for my HP computer.

I downloaded and ran the executable, which extracted a file called f6flpy32.exe into a temporary directory. Don’t bother trying to run this one, because it’ll just prompt you for a floppy drive.

So how to get the drivers out of this file? There are a few options that you can try, depending on how the manufacturer packed the files.

   * You can use Winimage to extract them, which is a shareware software, but you can use it during the trial period for free.
   * You can try and use WinRar to extract the file. In many instances this will extract a *.flp file, which you can mount in a VMware virtual machine or potentially with some ISO mounting software.
   * Some drivers will allow you to automatically extract into a directory. You’ll have to try it and see what happens.
   * Other methods? If you’ve got other ideas, leave them in the comments and I’ll add them to this list.

Here’s the list of files that Winimage can handle, which is quite a lot.

Start WinImage and then open the file, and you should see the contents. Just extract them to a folder, preferably with a useful name so you can remember it later.

Good Luck