Hard drive not being recognized

Hello, it looks like somehow the master boot record was erased from the hard drive, maybe viral? You mentioned the hard drive was recognized in the bios correct? If you need data from the hard drive the easiest way would be to pull the hard drive out and use an external hard drive enclosure to remove the data before you erase everything from the hard drive. If you dont need anything thing you can proceed to do a new install of Windows 7. Turn the computer on then hold alt and the f10 key to perform a factory recovery. This will erase everything and reinstall Windows 7. If this doesnt work then you will need a new hard drive and a bootable usb drive with Windows 7 on it. Hope this helps.

I would say there is a driver missing causing that. Here is hp.com and drivers for you.
Are you installing a brand new drive, if you are have you initialised it?

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?os=228&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&sw_lang=&product=3224052

Hope that helps.

Hello alvaro 891,

You can go to this website,

http://www.ehow.com/how_4441105_format-laptop-hard-drive.html

Hope that helps.


Yours truly,
Art Pena

Try taking the drive out of the enclosure and buying a usb adaoter that will fir the interface the hard drive has...either EIDE or SATA, then hook that up to a usb port and see if the computer will load it. May be the controller card in the enclosure is your problem.

You could have a faulty disk controller. Try inserting a different working hard disk into the HP and see if it can detect it in the BIOS. If not then the disk controller is faulty and this is a motherboard problem. A replacement motherboard may not be worth it, put your money towards a new laptop and put the hard disk into an USB hard drive adapter case and use it as an USB external hard drive.

Your laptop has a SATA hard drive and windows XP doesn't recognize those drives cause the operating system came out before those drive were made.

Follow these steps I found thru google to get windows xp sp3 to recognize your drive:

http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-39282-xp-can-t-recognize-hard-drive-for-os-install

You'll have to use a program to do this but people explain how to do it on that page plus the program is free.

you will need to install the drivers for your drive.
xp doesn;t recognize 2.0 usb unless you install drivers and have a usb 2.0 port
but install the drivers and you should get it to recognize

you can go to control panel, system and device manager.
look for a usb device that is not working and right click install drivers or update drivers.
See if it comes up.
Once it does you will see it in the device manager under disk drives

Hi. Once I had this similar problem with a HP Pavilion dv9000. "No Operating System"; "Windows Recovery Console cannot continue because there's no HD present..press F3 to Exit". No progress with Safe Mode nor Command Prompt, etc.
Then I went to the Bios, change tab to "System Configuration" and change the "Sata Native Support" to disable, whitch says that by changing to disable the HD would work better if the Operating System are Win2000 and Win9x.
Hit "Safe and Exit" and the computer started normaly!
I relly don't know how or why. It just work.
I don't know if would work for Linux (mine had Windows XP) and don't know the Bios view of your laptop. But you can explore and give it a try.
Hope this helps.
God Bless You!

Same problem. Blinking green light. Device not recognized. Have my whole life on this drive! HELP!

take ur device and throw it in nearby river