Windows 7 installation: No hard drives found (Dell Vostro)

Question

My Dell Vostro 3500 (anno 2010) laptop lost it's hard drive which I easily replaced. Problem: The laptop was not shipped with a Windows installation media, so the recovery options was located on the faulty hard drive.

Dell Denmark asks almost $100 to send a new installation media. Luckily I found a clean Windows 7 OEM iso file online, which should be working with my license key.

I don't get that far.

The Windows installation says No drives were found. Click load driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation.

I already tried:

• Changing hard drive setting to and from AHCI to Legacy IDE in BIOS.
• Providing the installation with the Intel Rapid Storage driver provided by Dell as well as the chipset drivers. No other drivers seem relevant to the hard drive.

Nothing seems to help. Any advice?

Solution

Apparantly Windows Setup does not list hard drives partitioned in a away it does not understand. I think my hard drive had been formatted for a Unix system.

Solution is really simple. From the Windows Setup access the repair utilities and use command prompt to access diskpart as follows:

diskpart
list disk

Now use that info to select your disk

select disk=1

And the next command will clear the disk, so if you are not going to use all of the hard drive please be aware not to lose any data now!

clean

Voila. Hit the close button and start the setup process again, the disk will be there.

I had a bonus problem, Windows could not find or create a system partition...

Solution to that problem was install in IDE-mode and/or set hard drive to 1st boot priority. This seems to be a USB-install bug.

Comments

[shrmn]

Do all your hard drives appear in your BIOS? Have you tried AHCI mode while providing the drivers from Intel during the Windows installation?

[shrmn]

Might be worthy to note that you can use the Windows 7 USB Download tool from Microsoft to create a thumbdrive containing the windows 7 installation files based on that ISO you managed to obtain. You can then add a folder in the same thumbdrive with the drivers.

[ganesh]

True. There are many ways to do this. MS tools for MBR disks. Or manually (format NTFS, copy files from the iso, run bootsect /nt60). Or format the pendrive as FAT32 and move the EFI boot files around. Lots of ways to make a bootable pen drive and also add the drivers.