Installing WinXP on a Z61p - "No harddisk found"

[UnicornOfDoom]

Hi there;

i want to sell my old Z61P and tried to format and reinstall it. So i insert my WinXP pro CD, boot from CD and the installer starts. However, after agreeing to the licence, the installer tells me "no harddisk found" at the part where you have to select your partition and i cannot continue with the installation.
The harddisk itself is fine; its shows up in BIOS and when i got this error first i installed Ubuntu on it and it runs and boots just as expected. The XP pro CD is an original one as well; and it did work earlier when i installed XP from it on a VM.

Is there any particular trick to install XP on this laptop? It is still it's original 100GB harddisk (ye olde winchester drive - no SSD); and BIOS settings are back to default.

[ajkula66]

Welcome to the forum!

Go into BIOS>Configuration and switch the SATA mode from AHCI to Compatibility, press F10 to save and exit, done.

[TuuS]

Another option besides compatibility mode is to add intel sata drivers to your winXP setup disc. You can do this with a freeware app called nLite, or if you want a setup disc with SATA and SP3 added, I have some listed in the marketplace, however you probably won't see a lot of difference running in compatibility mode if you have an older harddrive but I'd recommend it if using a fast hdd or sdd.