The system SSD in my z820 recently failed completely and I'm trying to install a 3.5 inch SATA drive in its place just to get it up and running again.
The machine boots fine from my Win 7 installation disk and install starts, but like others have posted no drives will show up. I can see the disk is recognized in the Mini OROM display during startup, but then it does not show up in the BIOS or of course the Windows installer. I've been all over the internet for solutions, including this site, and tried just about everything I can think of but I'm not even clear what the problem is which makes it hard to find a solution. I have not had this machine long and not been into the BIOS much so I'm not totally sure where the disk should show up anyway, but it doesn't appear in either of the Storage settings.
Tried changing some of the BIOS settings as has been suggested on some sites I've find and the following occurs:
In Storage Options with SATA mode set to RAID+AHCI the installer prompts me for a CD/DVD device driver. No idea what this is about -- there's only the DVD drive that the installer disk is successfully being read from.
With SATA mode set to IDE, I don't get the driver prompt and I'm taken straight to the installation -- but no drives show up. This is where I have attempted a lot of driver installs, including the driver pack for this machine from HP's site, by unzipping the exe's to a flash drive. Nothing works, and again I'm really unclear what I'm even doing here as I've never had to install drivers right at OS setup, and have done dozens. The installer does not give clear feedback about what's going on either. Simply says "No drives were found. Click load driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation". What does that mean?
Other suggestions have including using DISKPART to clean the disk. This didn't work either, as it couldn't find the disk.
Very frustrated at this point -- never hit such a brick wall with simply getting a drive to show up in BIOS on a system.
Can anyone at least explain what the issue probably is here? Have found several sites that suggest it's because the version of Windows I have predates the machine hence the need for driver installation, but this doesn't really make sense to me as it seems this would be a BIOS not a driver thing.