I have a semi-new Alienware laptop that I plan on giving to a friend. It is well out of it's warranty period. I wanted to re-install Windows on it, to wipe the drive clean so that he would have a fresh install.

I popped the Windows XP disk that came with the computer in, and restarted the computer. I got through the installation process up until I had to choose where to install windows when I got this screen:



For whatever reason, no hard drives were detected successfully. I hit "Enter" to install anyway, and got this screen:



I tried hitting any combonation of keys, restarting each time, to no avail. I remembered having a similar problem on another computer, which I solved by installing a Linux distro, then installing Windows after that. After installing Linux, and trying to install Windows again, I get the two same messages.

I'm totally lost, I've spend hours and hours looking into this problem, and found no solid answers.

Thanks in advance!

Welcome to PCHF, what is the exact model number of the laptop?

It is a Area-51M 7700

P4 3.0Ghz 800FSB
NVidia 6800 FXGO
Hitachi Notebook 60GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
1GB Samsung PC4200

Problem resolved upon finding proper drivers, thanks.