Hard Drive Not Found

[normajm]

I have a Dell Inspiron 2500 notebook (Win2K) which I believe has a failed hard drive. Bios shows no HD. I bought a new 40gb HD, original was 20gb, but BIOS doesn't see that one either. Am I missing a step somewhere?

Thanks

[ktkendall]

Do you for sure have new harddrive jumpered and cabled correctly. Did you replace the drive exactly in place of the old one??? Red stripe on the cable goes to pin 1 and your jumper setting should be CS or master if CS doesn't work and could even be no jumper if it's by itself and is a Wester Digital drive. What make is the new drive?? Aside from that you may have to actually go into the BIOS and set it to detect the new drive.
EDIT: Sorry I wasn't paying close enough attention to see that this is a laptop, still though you need to set the little jumper same as the old drive and be sure cable is the correct way, I don't think you can put it backwards on those, and only other thing is to enter the BIOS and try to get it to detect the new drive, you may have a blown IDE controller in which case your old drive may still be good too, so don't throw it away yet..

[DougL]

Dont forget to take the IDE pin adapter off the old H/D and put it on the new one, i,ve forgotten this before and wondered why the drive was not seen.

Doug

[normajm]

Thanks Doug, that did the trick. Didn't realize that was an adapter, just thought the connector looked different because it was a different HD.

[normajm]

Thanks KT for the reply. I did check the failed HD in a working system and it failed there, too. It didn't see the new HD because I forgot about the adapter.

[DougL]

your welcome, glad to help.

Doug