reformat my laptop with windows xp?

This is a little complicated. The reason that it can't find a hard drive is because you're using a SATA drive and Windows XP came out before SATA interfaces, so it doesn't have the drivers for it. You need to find and download the textmode version of the drivers for your chipset. You then need to either put them on a floppy disk if you have a drive, or make a new copy of your Windows XP setup CD using a program called nLite that you can get from this link: http://www.nliteos.com/

The nLite website has instructions on how to do this, should it prove difficult. If you do have a floppy drive in your machine (unlikely these days and a USB stick won't work for this) then at the first part of the XP installation, you need to press F6 when it says, "Press F6 if you need to install third party SCSI or RAID drivers' at the bottom of the screen, and then put the floppy in the drive for it to read the drivers from - this is of course the easiest way but most computers either don't have a floppy drive or it's broken through lack of use.

Using nLite you can create a new copy of the XP setup CD that contains the drivers that it needs to be able to access the hard drive. Oddly enough though the XP setup CD is capable of partitioning and formatting a SATA drive, but it'll always fail when attempting to install without these drivers on a modern machine.

confident you may consistently reformat it and positioned the XP disc in. i do no longer propose this however, XP is becoming a factor of the previous very such as 2000. in case you hate Vista that lots, wait till later this 300 and sixty 5 days or begining of next this way the latest living house windows 7 would be popping out on all new desktops

Do you have an "Upgrade" disk or a "Full Install" disk?

The "Full Install" should assume it's being loaded on to a completely empty disk. All the "Upgrade" really cares about is that you already paid money for a previous version. But it might choke on a fully formatted disk, because the only way it can know is to look for the previous version on the disk.

hi, guess this may be a driver issue. getting right drivers should fix it. try the official hp site first, if that doesn't help, hope these sites work for you instead:

http://www.hp-driver.net/

http://www.hp-drivers.org/

you can also check out this link:

http://www.drivers-updates.net/drivers/windows-xp-...

hope my answer helps.

good luck

hello heres what u need to do to reformat go into the bios once in under the one that says boot device make the cd rom the first device. then reboot it shoud boot to the cd then follow all onscreen prompts to install windows good luck!!!!!!!!