I am assisting my neighbor reformatting his laptop (old one). The laptop was not in use for a while. The laptop is Toshiba Satellite A205-S5851 As far as I can check (using Acronis Director and UBCD4Win CD's) it has a HD 250Gb and 2GB of RAM. After booting to the operating system CD I've got the following: "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu" I checked the BIOS but didn't find any "disk controller"
You likely can get around this by changng from AHCI mode to IDE mode in BIOS. Are you trying to install XP BTW?
i would on the xp topic,it would give the system a nice speed boost but that's just me. that laptops not that fast. hirens boot cd is good too and has a live winxp boot option to mess with hdds if it boots that is and it doesn't on all pcs. that or linix mint.you can boot the hole os off a dvd then mess with the hdd with gparted. hirensbootcd your hdd 100% wiped samy with kill-disk or something like it and its 100% showing up in the bios and or other bootable programs ?
Thanks for prompt replay. I reviewed the content of the BIOS (i.e. line by line) but not found nothing related to HD mode, either AHCI nor IDE. The disk has been reformatted many times using the attempt to install an operating system and also using Disc Director. I also re-sized the HDD to two partitons. I've try to install XP. Same issue. The booting process is running until the HDD formatting. After then i got the 'gparted' problem. I've never used Hirens CD . Which function to run from this CD? Using UBCD4WIN I ran a complete chkdsk Is it possible to change the HDD mode (as proposed above by Nosirrah) using Hirens CD? IMHO this is the root of the problem. Thanks
It's unusual to have no such option in your BIOS - and it is only a BIOS option, you can't change it with the boot cd. However, this will help: How to integrate a SATA AHCI driver in a Windows XP Setup CD https://aps2.toshiba-tro.de/kb0/TSB85017Z0000R01.htm It has instructions on how to add the required driver to your XP CD. Once you've done this you will be able to install XP.
Thanks you all for your answers. The issue is solved. I reviewed again and in details the BIOS which seems to be "not detailed" like other ones I've seen. Roger_m, I agree with you and was also surprise not to find it. Nevertheless, under the the tab BOOTH (booth sequence) I remarked that the different items were with a dark blue font color, while the HDD was with white font color and had an exclamation mark (!) in front of it. I clicked on HDD and got (on the right side of the screen) instructions how to change the boot sequence but also to press Shift+1 to enable or disable an item. That what I did while on HDD; the font color changed to dark blue and the mark (!) disappeared. Again Thanks
