replacement hard drive problems

[dave21478]

Hi.

The hard drive in my laptop is A -small, and B -starting to make funny clunking noises. The rest of the computer is fine with decent RAM etc so I bought a replacement drive. Its a second hand (with guarantee) job, 160Gb.

I fitted it, then ran the set-up discs that came with the computer (I ave re-installed windows several times in the past on the old drive with no problems) and it went through its usual routine, until it asked to remove the setup disc and it would reboot. Upon startup, there is the usual "ACER" screen, then a few lines of grey text on a black screen as normal, then it says "operating system not found." and it stops there.

I fittd the replacement drive in a portable drive caddy I have and plugged it (usb port) into another PC and it pops up as normal as a spare drive. I formatted it for luck then ran setup again on the laptop with the same results. Browsing the drive contents with it plugged into the desktop pc shows it to be empty apart from the windows files I would expect to find on it.

It seems that the laptop just isnt keen on recognising this drive or looking in the right place for windows. What can I do now?

 

[AnOther]

Can you see it in the BIOS

If yes then it's possible that it's not been made active, there are a couple of ways to do this.

If you have a floppy or bootable USB drive with the DOS programme Fdisk on it you can boot to that and make it active.

Another way would be to connect it to another machine, USB will do, then in Disk Management make it active.

For Disk Management right click on My Computer, them Manage, then Disk Management.

EDIT: Another thought. If it's a SATA drive then you may need 3rd party drivers for it. Which OS are you trying to install ?

PS: Just upgraded my netbook from 250gb to 500gb !

[dave21478]

[quote user="AnOther"]Can you see it in the BIOS

If yes then it's possible that it's not been made active, there are a couple of ways to do this.

.....

Another way would be to connect it to another machine, USB will do, then in Disk Management make it active.

For Disk Management right click on My Computer, them Manage, then Disk Management.

.......[/quote]

 

This worked a treat.  Many, many thanks!

 

 

[Théière]

I remember doing something similar a while back and tried all Ernst's ideas above (including F1 on startup) but still had a problem as the drive was larger than the machine could read. I did a bios update still no good and had to partition the drive down to a size the machine could work with.

Good stuff [:)]

[AnOther]

[geek][:D]

Théière: You must be talking of some time ago and an old machine. Personally I have always partitioned drives, it made no sense to me to have one huge partition. In days gone by (FAT 16 & 32) it made sense from a cluster size point of view. It's not so relevant for NTFS but it's a habit from those days which I have never broken, plus I usually have at least a dual boot system which obviously necessitates it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365

[Théière]

Yes, it was an old Hp and I believe I too was playing with dual boot system at the time. Just remembered from the thread that it had a size limit.

[Pierre ZFP]

Annoyingly the XBox requires their hard drives to be formatted FAT32 so you can't load files (eg films) greater than 4Gb

Thank you so much Microweak