Laptop and new hard drive - will not boot/bios.

[nev_payne]

Hey folks, only me.

Having spot of bother with said Evesham lightweight laptop. The old hard drive appeared to be having physical difficulties...a loos object was in the drive ( not a good sign) and it kept resetting the head loudly (almost throwing it form one side of the platter to the other. We decided to replace it and about 25 screws later removed the old drive to replace it with a 40GB seagate momentus. The result is the laptop refuses to get passed bootstrap...let alone detecting the dam hard drive. This happens for CS and Master. Slave will allow booting…from floppy/CD, but BIOS doesn't detect the drive.

BIOS flashing seems the strong option - but you try finding a bios flash for a lappy lol. The momentus is brand new - arrived this morning. The specs of said evesham:

Celeron 800
192 MB ram
External CD/Floppy
Previously used hdd - Hitachi 20GB DK23CA-20
New hdd - Seagate Momentus 40GB 5400.2

Cheers chaps.

[nev_payne]

BUMP- and update. It appears the hard drive doesnt detect properly in a USB caddy - the old one will happily perform a scandisk and check right through as well as a format, the new Seagate won't properly show in My Computer however - can someone help out here? I know the USB problem is much easier to solve in comparison to the above problem, so any advice will be great.

Nev.

[nev_payne]

Anyone? Come on people! Brit in trouble here!

[5lab]

could be a faulty drive - if it doesnt even show up in a usb caddy. try putting the old drive in the usb caddy (to check it works) - i'd rma the hdd.

[Reaps]

Best to check if it shows up in device manager first under disk drives if it does then you need to do the following.....

If it's a new drive then it won't be partitioned, if it's xp you are using goto computer management under admin tools in the control panel and look for the drive there. Create a partition on it and it will show up in my computer...

[nev_payne]

OK some good news - the new hard drive is working - just needed to initialise the drive....went through several checks and a deep scandisk - all is looking good.

Anyone got a shot on the laptop issue? I'm thinking it could be an issue with the IDE controller.

[Reaps]

I take it the jumpers are properly set?