I’m trying to help a friend install a new copy of XP. His Acer notebook comes installed with Vista. I want to make his computer a dual-boot system, or at worst, remove Vista, reformat the whole hard drive and start anew. The problem is that when I boot with the XP installation disk the notebook’s hard drive is hidden. So XP installation reports there is no hard drive. If i use BartPE to boot, the notebook’s hard drive is also hidden. There must be something in the BIOS that hides the hard disk if you boot from CD-Rom or anything else other than the hard disk. But I can’t find it. I’ve experimented with the boot sequence but it makes no difference. How do I make the hard disk visible so that I can install XP? Thanks.
Tks Python. But the bios is already set to IDE0. And there is no HDD configuration option. There is no mention of choosing SATA or IDE anywhere in the bios configuration pages.

I put my flash disk/ USB into the computer, and my AntiVirus said that there was a virus and I had to deny access to my USB.

Then I went to My Computer and had it reformatted.
I then transferred a couple of files into the USB.

So I don’t know where the virus came from. I used the USB the day before and there was also a virus and I reformatted it. Is it possible that the virus came from the another computer? Because the last time I used it before now was on a different computer.

And is reformatting all I need to get rid of that virus? Or do i just have to buy a new USB?

hi, so this is my situation
some malware got to my computer and restarted it and now I cannot boot my pc in any mode.it just crashes and restarts when the loading bar starts to move.
I was wondering if anyone could help me, i think I need some sort of bootable malware removal tool or something? the idea is to be able to boot the cd and let the removal tool remove the malware or whatever it is.do you have any ideas? or is the another way to get my pc back to normal.(i wouldnt want to reformat my pc). thanks