Hey guys, LONG time since posting, yes I fell off the face of the earth for awhile there. Work is killing me. Anyway.
 
One of my co-worker's laptops just took a dump on him, total HD failure, it's out of warranty and is pretty much a POS anyway. 
 
I have an older laptop sitting around that was given to me from a friend. Basically it has Vista Home Premium on it, but it was virus central. Couldn't do anything with it other than reformat it. I never did anything with it and it sat on a shelf. But with my co-workers lappy dying. I decided to offer it to him for a couple rounds of beer at the bar and 20 bucks lol. I didn't know it would be this much trouble. Getting Vista to reinstall was no problem at all, just put in a disc, used the key on the back of the lappy and done. But apparently he cannot stand vista and wants me to install XP onto it.
 
He gave me a legit XP disc w/ SP1a... I tried to install with no joy, keep getting a "No Hard Drive" error. I then looked around online and found people saying that you need a floppy with SATA drivers but a disc from XP w/ SP2 will fix that. So I dug around for my SP2 disc and still get the same error. I just popped in the vista disc again and it started up the install process no problem so I canceled it. The Hard Drive is good and there, just XP isn't detecting it somehow.
 
So, any ideas? Keep in mind that beer is on the line here, so it's of heightened importance. 

because most people move forwards instead of backwards?
Anyways, you can always try installing from a USB disk and see if that helps.

nvm i see you tried an sp2 disk. 
 
heres an idea, put that lappy drive into an external enclosure and install os onto it like it was a main drive.  then remove the drive from enclosure and place in lappy (i have had to do this a couple of times).
 
also mak sure that there isnt a problem with the lappy board and doublecheck the hdd for functionality.

sinephase
You have to force the drive into IDE mode or non AHCI mode
 

 
I concur..Either that or Compatibility Mode, however the BIOS is worded. 

Well yeah sounds frustrating as hell. Maybe slipstreaming the install will work :(

slipstream the drivers, if that doesnt work then your next step is to start the XP install on another computer, this means going through the part where it copies the CD to the Hard Drive, then shut down, and put it in the laptop, it wont have installed any OS specific data yet for hardware, and this should fix your problem right as rain.