Help troubleshooting laptop issue with some kind of HDD issue

[craigap]

I came to the conclusion that my HDD was faulty after my computer froze up on me and wouldn't boot to the OS from that point on. It would go to the menu where it says something along the lines of Safe Mode, Safe Mode with networking, Last know good configuration, Start Windows Normally, etc etc. Choosing any selection would result in just a black screen and the HDD activity light was inactive. So I purchased a new HDD.

The Laptop is a Toshiba M400

I formatted the new HDD in my HDD dock on my other computer and then installed it. I attempted to use both sets of my Toshiba recovery discs to install the OS, but after the RAMDISK IMAGE LOADING phase it would then say PLEASE WAIT and nothing would happen from there on. No HDD activity light.

To try another option I went ahead and tried installing Windows XP from one of my old OS discs just to see what would happen. Again it loaded everything and once it got to STARTING WINDOWS it just sat there doing nothing forever. No HDD activity light.

Next I tried my VISTA Business OS Disc. It ran through the Setup up until the point it asked me which disc I wanted to install windows on. At this point windows had detected no drives to install it on. While still trying to install Vista and still on the "Choose Drive to install on" phase of the install I decided to put the old HDD that I thought was bad into the dock and plugged the USB dock into my M400. I clicked refresh on the VISTA installation to look for a HDD to load the OS to. And what do I see but my old HDD showing up with the 2 partitions-the OS and recovery partitions. For kicks I pulled the new HDD out of the machine while it was still running and sitting on the VISTA install screen for the install location. I popped the new HDD into the dock with the old one and there was. Both HDD's show up as intall locations on the USB dock, but they would not show up when directly connected to the SATA internal connection.

I did a little more playing around I found that the BIOS says there IS a BUILT-IN HDD plugged in when there is indeed a HDD plugged into the internal SATA wire. If I pull the HDD out and leave no HDD in the laptop at all then it says BUILT-IN HDD ERROR immediatly upon powering on the laptop.

So my question is....It seems that the two HDD's both old and new are not being detected by the laptop when plugged into the sata connector within the laptop but they are both detected by the VISTA install when plugged into the dock. Does this confirm there is some kind of circuitry issue on the mobo that is the problem?

[craigap]

Anyone? I can't seem to figure this out.

[kilgoretrout]

Try zero filling the new hard drive with the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities and see if the drive is detected by the vista installation routine. You don't need to partition and format a new hard drive to run a windows installation. The windows installation routine can handle those tasks and will sometimes have problems with disks that have been partitioned by other utilities. Also, see if those manufacturer utilities see the new hard drive when it is installed in your laptop and run the diagnostics on the new drive if it is detected. Finally, confirm that your new hard drive's size is properly reported in your bios setup.

You can find the hard drive diagnostic utilities on the manufacturer's website in the form of an iso image file which can be burned to a CD-R as an image. That CD-R will be bootable and will boot to the diagnostic utilities.

[craigap]

Thanks for the help so far. Toshiba doesn't seem to have any diagnostic utilities to download and burn an ISO CD from. Are you referring specifically to a HDD diagnostic utility, or some kind of system wide utility that can analyze all kinds of things? The only system-type diagnostic utility I can find from toshiba is one that is installed and used while the machine is actually bootable to the OS.

[glc]

What brand is the hard drive in question?

[kilgoretrout]

I am talking about the utilites available from the manufacturer of the hard drive, eg Seagate, Western Digital, etc. Most of the majors have the utilities I described on their websites. That's the reason for glc's question.