Laptop Help

[Alex247]

Hello, I recently purchased a new Western Digital 250 gig laptop hard drive. I got it home and plugged it into my computer and booted up my Windows XP disk. When I tried to install or repair a new OS it said that a hard drive was not detected. I later tried a Windows 98 disk and it "said" that it had formatted the hard drive and then it tried to install windows 98 on it but kept getting stuck and freezing on the hardware configuration part. That isnt surprising since I have a core 2 duo and all this other new junk. I would like some help with this problem quickly today is the last day to return it.

thanks

Laptop is as follows

HP dv6000
core 2 duo 1.73 GHZ
4 gigs of RAM (but I put in only 1 GIG when I was installing the OS's because windows 98 cant start with 4 gigs)
NVIDIA 7400 videocard
originally 100 gig HD

[pam123]

See if this thread helps : http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=190529


edit :

That laptop will support 160 GB with no problem. There is an option in the BIOS of most Lenovos to turn off AHCI and/or turn on Compatibility Mode; you may want to try toggling that and see if you can install XP afterwards.

I think you've run into the same problem.

[Dia]

Heres a checklist:

Reseat the drive make sure the correct setting is on the drive (some laptops require the use of cable select rather then master/slave setting)

Boot into cmos and make sure bios detects the drive and the information is accurate.

Boot to windows xp cd

create a partition

format the partition

try to install windows

if that fails try to go to the recovery console and run chkdsk to check for bad sectors.

[glc]

You need a floppy drive and a SATA driver to use a generic XP CD. Win98 can't handle it because it's larger than 128gb. You can use the HP recovery CD's without a driver.

[t3mpest88]

Originally Posted by glc You need a floppy drive and a SATA driver to use a generic XP CD. Win98 can't handle it because it's larger than 128gb. You can use the HP recovery CD's without a driver.

yobrougotdownsbro?

You don't need a floppy drive... or a SATA driver to use a "generic" (whatever "generic" means) XP CD.

Windows loads default drivers upon booting from the disk.

Unless you're running a RAID configuration you don't need a special driver. And even then, you can load it post-installation.

[pam123]

Originally Posted by t3mpest88 yobrougotdownsbro? You don't need a floppy drive... or a SATA driver to use a "generic" (whatever "generic" means) XP CD. Windows loads default drivers upon booting from the disk. Unless you're running a RAID configuration you don't need a special driver. And even then, you can load it post-installation.

Hey guy,
Chill.
Depending on his laptop's motherboard we may all be wrong.
We need to hear back from him.

If you know more about this make/model tell us but this post ain't helping anyone.

[thefultonhow]

Originally Posted by t3mpest88 yobrougotdownsbro? You don't need a floppy drive... or a SATA driver to use a "generic" (whatever "generic" means) XP CD. Windows loads default drivers upon booting from the disk. Unless you're running a RAID configuration you don't need a special driver. And even then, you can load it post-installation.

By "generic" I'm sure glc meant an XP CD without custom-integrated mass storage drivers. Just FYI, newer SATA laptops use the Advanced Host Configuration Interface (AHCI) for their hard drive interfaces. This is not natively supported by XP setup and thus if this mode is enabled, XP won't recognize a hard drive (trust me, I have seen dozens if not hundreds of laptops with this issue). Some laptops allow you to disable this mode; others don't. Either way, you will either need to have the mode off or to manually load the driver from a floppy as glc said. Since XP can't install on an AHCI interface without the driver, you cannot load it once XP installs, because it won't install in the first place.

Moderator note: insults are not tolerated on PCMech. Even if you think someone is wrong, there are much better ways to say so than "yobrougotdownsbro."

[glc]

Nice first post. Read the forum rules.

- Forum Administrator -