Windows 7 Install: No drives were found

hard driveinstallationwindows 7

I was building a computer for my wife with an older SATA hard drive that I had lying around, and when attempting to do a new install of Windows 7 on it, the installer says:

"No drives were found. Click Load Driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation."

I ran the diskpart command: list volume, and it showed up as "Raw". So, I formatted it to NTFS and then it showed up as a healthy drive in diskpart. I also ran check disk on it with no errors. Windows 7 installer STILL can't find the drive. As far as BIOS settings, I have tried "Native IDE", AHCI, and Both AHCI/IDE mode (SATA slots 0-2 AHCI, 3-4 IDE). I tried all combinations… still "no drives were found".

At this point, I'm just scratching my head. Using the installation dos window, I can see and talk to the drive just fine, but the installer just doesn't see it at all. I've even written folders and files to the drive, and it still "can't be seen". Any help would be great.

Items of interest:

  • Motherboard model: Gigabyte GA-A75M-UD2H – BIOS Version F5 (latest)
  • Hard drive model: 80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380817AS (no other drives)
  • Installing Windows 7 using a FAT32 formatted USB Drive, which I've used for other installs

Best Answer

Note that running these commands will break any previous OS and data on disk.

After you get past the language selection, select Repair, open Command Prompt and type the following commands (pressing Enter after each one):

diskpart

list disk

select disk <number>

clean

Restart the system, and now you should be able to complete the installation.

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