I'm working on a laptop for a guy at work, it's a Dell Inspiron 1525. Specs are:

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86GHZ processor
2GB DDR2 RAM
160GB HDD
Running Windows Vista Basic

He was having problems with it freezing up and not letting him do anything. So he gave it to me, I ran virus scans, spyware and malware scans and couldn't find anything. So I ran a chkdsk and it found a lot of bad sectors on the HDD. I tried running chkdsk /r and it would make it partway through and then freeze up. So I ended up buying him a new HDD from newegg.com. I install it, and he doesn't have the Windows recovery disk for Vista, so I USED one of my Dell recovery disks for XP instead. He said that XP was fine for him so I went to install XP, pressed "enter" to install XP from the menu and then it brings up a screen that says a hard drive could not be detected. So I checked the BIOS and it SEES the new hard drive I got, but Windows recovery couldn't find a hard drive. So I put the old hard drive in thinking I got a dud from Newegg but it can't find that one either. I haven't changed any settings in the BIOS that would turn off the SATA connection. (The HDD's are SATA). Any ideas on what might be causing this? They need this laptop back soon cause his daughter is using it at school. Thanks for any insight!Don't know if any of the information contained in this ARTICLE is relevant to your situation. However it is very extensive in identifying probable causes and does provide solutions. Give it a look and hopefully it will assist you. There are a number of issues that can cause what you are experiencing.truenorth
http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/hdd/failSetupDetect-c.html Quote from: beanhead07 on August 14, 2010, 06:22:24 AM

I'm working on a laptop for a guy at work, it's a Dell Inspiron 1525...
I went to install XP, pressed "enter" to install XP from the menu and then it brings up a screen that says a hard drive could not be detected. So I checked the BIOS and it sees the new hard drive I got, but Windows recovery couldn't find a hard drive. So I put the old hard drive in thinking I got a dud from Newegg but it can't find that one either. I haven't changed any settings in the BIOS that would turn off the SATA connection. (The HDD's are SATA). Any ideas on what might be causing this?...