The problem with this setting is it comes under several different names and can be found in different sections within the BIOS. Most BIOS’s for several years have included a fallback mode to enable a SATA drive to behave like an IDE drive, and therefore makes it visible to XP during setup. The first and mos obvious method is to change the SATA Mode to IDE in the system BIOS. Thankfully there are a few ways to get around this problem and enable Windows XP to be installed onto a SATA hard drive so you can enjoy the extra performance and other functions like hotplug/AHCI etc. As most computers within the last decade or so have some form of SATA controller, if you try to install Windows onto a SATA drive, XP won’t recognize it because the drivers aren’t present on the installation disc, so they need to be loaded manually for the drive to be picked up. This problem is quite a common one and is simply due to the fact that when Windows XP was created, the SATA chipset itself and SATA hard drives weren’t available to the masses, so support for it wasn’t included in the XP setup process. This may involve running a manufacturer-supplied diagnostic or setup program. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is correct. Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. The hard drive is detected with no problem in the BIOS and also on start up POST, able to boot up Linux Live CDs but the hard drive is just not being detected in Windows setup. When users try to install Windows XP, they encounter the problem of not being able to find any hard disk drives installed as if they weren’t connected. We’ve seen this question posted in our forum many times, so thought we should write an article on this problem.

Nc6400 mass storage controller driver