I am coming up against this missing HDD in windows setup problem too.
Whilst i dont have a (tested) solution yet i do see some light at the end of the tunnel.
I just bought one of the scaleo e carcasses from maplin and fitted a 1TB SATA Hitachi HDD.
I then tried to do a test install of XP on it just to make sure everything was working, I made a 4gig partition
Installed XP
and was amazed at how slowly the install CD booted, i think the bios is telling the dvd drive to only run at 1x speed or something, so it takes an age for the xp install to get going, the black screen will go away.
Then I installed XP, rebooted, installed sound drivers, then i noticed that my boot device was labeled H:
That wouldnt have been too much of a problem except the brain dead scaleo VFD display driver install goes nuts if your boot device isnt C:
So i did a stupid thing.
I edited the registry to make the boot device C: and rebooted, needless to say it hung on reboot, so i tried to reinstall and at that point I got the no drives found error.
At first i thought it was a problem with the ICH6 chipset negotiating the SATA speed so i put the drive in another machine and used hitachi's drive setting boot CD to set the speed to 1.5Gbit, that didnt fix the problem
Then after booting ubuntu fine and seeing the drive I had an idea.
Under ubuntu I ran 'sudo fdisk /dev/sda' and deleted the partition I had created so the drive didnt have any partitions on it at all, saved that and rebooted with the XP install CD
Huzzah the drive was now recognised in the xp install menu again.
Whilst this isnt a tested solution, the signs seem to indicated this has some sort of brain dead bios that wont let you install XP unless there are no partitions on the HDD you plan to install to, if the HDD has been used before it seems you must remove the previous partitions from it before you try to install.
en4rab
Update - well it did the first stage of installing and rebooted and booted into the rest of the install fine, I think my problem with misnamed drives was due to the extremely small test partition I made, I tried a 30GB partition this time and the signs are that it will be C: (thats what the xp partition bit named it) but the install is still going so i cant tell yet)