Hdd Problem

[FIREWALL]

I hope someone can help me with this.

I put a new hdd in my laptop and in the bioes it recognizes it'

But when it goes thru the booting process it tells me it cant find a hdd.

Any ideas ? Edit: It shows this.

bump----

[Etienne]

Got windows?

If you don't have at least one bootable media (Floppy disk, CD, USB device, HDD with an OS), it won't get all the way there.

Yeah, that's pretty basic. But that's how far my computer knowledge extends.

[FIREWALL]

Originally Posted by FIREWALL

I hope someone can help me with this.

I put a new hdd in my laptop and in the bioes it recognizes it'

But when it goes thru the booting process it tells me it cant find a hdd.

Any ideas ? Edit: It shows this.

bump

[fatty]

Cables secure? Jumpers properly set?

[FIREWALL]

Yes btw it's a fairly new laptop and worked perfectly. I figured the hard drive took a crap and just got a new hdd and put it in. I was on subsim and went to get a cup of coffee and came back it was hungup in the middle of post. I rebooted and got the hard drive can't be located. When I put in the new hdd I got the blue message.

Any more ideas. I appreciate all your help.

[sonar732]

I figured it was probably something with newer hardware, so took a look at MS's KB.

[FIREWALL]

I took a look at that and with my skills I couldn't make heads or tails out of it.

[JSLTIGER]

It could be a motherboard problem with the IDE or SATA bus (depending which your HDD is on).

[NeonSamurai]

Could be you didnt set it up with a secondary program in the bios that handles hard drives. My board is like that where it has secondary bios type programs that show up after the post screen for my hard drives, wake up on x (lan etc), and changing the boot order, and they have entirely seperate menus from the bios itself

Failing that i would try a boot disk and try to manualy partition the drive. if the partition program cant see the drive, then either its a bios problem, or a hardware problem (defective drive, jumpers set up incorrectly on the back of the hd, or on the board itself, or just not properly pluged in).

First check you got it installed correctly, with the right jumper settings (master, primary drive), check the connections, and power.

Starting with the bios, check if its set to automaticly configure the drive, if it is already set that way you may want to try manualy configuring it (instructions that came with the drive should give you instructions as to how it should be configured)

Also go through the rest of the bios, make sure its on the boot list as a bootable drive, alot of the versions of windows (xp, nt, etc) refuse to install unless they are installed to the primary master drive, and that it is set as a boot drive in the bios. Also check for anything else that is incorrectly set up.

If all this fails then the drive may well be defective (unlikely but it does happen). I would seek proffessional help, or try to get a replacement.

[FIREWALL]

Greetings and salutations, everybody - thank you for your efforts at helping with this mess! My name is Gordon and I am a friend of Firewall's. I'm marginally more computer savy than Firewall, but this one's killing me! The computer in question is a fairly high end HP that was working perfectly up untill it kacked. No work had been done on it, and it died in the middle of a Subsim session. When the computer is turned on, it presents the black screen that give "A thousand pardons for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start sucsessfully. Start in Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Command Line, Safe Mode/networking, Last known good config, or Normal?" On selecting Last Known Good config, it blue-screens with the dreaded "BEGINNING DUMP OF PHYSICAL MEMORY" line and tries to re-start - only to repeat the process. I can get into the BIOS, but notice that there is no info displayed about the HDD. If I try to start Windows normally, the silly thing tells me that it can't find a hard drive. I obtained and installed a new drive, but got the same "No HDD found" message. This leads me to believe that the HDD is not the culprit. I re-installed the original HDD and ran the hard drive self-test in BIOS and got a message saying "#1 -07 fail". I've about reached my limit with this, so any helpfull words of wisdom would be appreciated. Or I could switch over to a judicial application of high-explosives!
Again, thanks for your help!
Gordon

[danlisa]

Have you tried repairing the MBR on the original HDD?

1. Insert the Windows Operating System Disc into the optical (CD or DVD) drive.
2. Press and hold the Power button for 5 Seconds to turn off the PC. Then press the Power button again to turn on the PC.
3. Press the Enter key when prompted to Boot from CD .
4. From the Windows Setup Menu, press the R key to start the Recovery Console.
5. At the C:\> prompt type FIXMBR then press the Enter key to continue.
6. Press the y key then press Enter when asked if you want to write a new MBR.
7. Once the MBR is successfully written, restart the notebook PC by pressing the Power button.

Failing that, I'd suggest calling HP Suport. Even if the laptop is out of warrantee, they should be able to help.

[FIREWALL]

Thx Dan Will give that a try.

[NeonSamurai]

Hmm to me that sounds like there is something wrong with the board or cable connecting it to the board if the bios is unable to detect either hard drive, it could also theoreticly be a power supply problem though this is unlikely.

One option is to reset the BIOS, also you can configure the drive manualy in the bios and see if that corrects the problem (I assume the bios is currently set to auto detect the drive). Other thing to try is to try clearing/resetting the CMOS, and try patching the BIOS

Failing that then the problem is probably with the hardware (formating, and the master boot record are irrelivant to the bios detecting the drive correctly).


I assume you have already gone through the manual and HP website to try to troubleshoot this.


One thing that doesnt make sense to me is how your able to even boot from the drive at all to get the windows start messages. If the HD doesnt exist somewhere on the bios then as far as the computer is concerned, it doesnt exist at all and would be entirely unable to read from it. Unless your actualy booting off a another disk or cd.

[SUBMAN1]

Your answer is - some hard drive SATA controllers, especially RAID controllers, but also some normal ones as well - Require a Driver!!!!!

Get the driver, load it up on a 3.5" disk and when you are booting the XP CD, you will see something saying 'hit F6 to install additional hard drive drivers'. This happens only for a second before the XP CD boots, so look for it on the bottom.

Let me know if you have any problems.

-S

[NeonSamurai]

Yes that is true, but generaly (unless the driver writes to the CMOS also) it will have no effect on the bios. The bios needs to be able to recognize the drive first before the os even can.