hi jephree, thanks for all the help, yes there is a utility cd and the dd is toshiba MK2546GSX. thankyou again. grace

Hi Grace,

As suspected your hard drive is a 250GB single physical drive divided into @ 3 x 80GB partitions.

It is also a SATA hard drive and this is why the XP setup CD cannot find it.

SATA was developed after XP and hence on install XP needs to be fed the SATA drivers.

Your manufacturer did this proceedure before it was shipped and now you also need to redo it if you want to fresh reinstall XP.

Here is your drive:

2.5-inch Hard Disk Drive Model MK2546GSX - Toshiba


If you insert and Open that Utility CD and look for Drivers do you find any SATA or perhaps SATA/RAID drivers on that CD?

The next question is does that laptop have a floppy drive? And if not do you have an USB thumb drive?

hi jephree, yes i have utility cd, it has intel chipset driver, vga driver, audio driver, modem driver,lan driver and wireless lan driver. there is no floppy but i have a usb pen drive thingy me bob. thanks grace

hey grace,

So no SATA or RAID drivers?

If not will the Chipset drivers fit on your USB thingy?

If so send them there then try the reinstall again using the F6 prompt to load drivers.

See what happens then.

hi jephree, on closer inspection of the utility disc when wxplorin to put chipset on usb drive i found a file titled f6 install tool so i will give that a whirl today and let you know. thankyou for all your help. grace

hi grace, that sounds hopeful, let us know how it goes.