My laptop hard drive gave me the "failure may be imminent" warning on bootup (after I had to cancel out a CHKDSK taking nearly a day, which followed a repair of my registry and of winlogon and the like after a shock that had caused my laptop to BSOD and then continue to do so every time I rebooted), so I bought a new hard drive and backed up my shit with XXClone, which worked well the last time I moved to a new drive (that time was to upgrade though, because 40GB was getting kinda cramped and I wanted to install the Adobe Creative Suite, Visual Studio Express, and the like without taking up nearly all of my space).
The only problem this time is that after installing the new drive, my laptop doesn't recognize it and fails to boot. I can bring the new disk to my desktop and it recognizes it just fine, and I can put the old drive in, get the ominous warning, and boot into Windows just fine and access the new drive, but I still can't boot from the new drive; I wonder whether my laptop's BIOS just won't recognize the new drive.
The laptop is an HP Pavilion ze4900, and the new drive is a 250GB WD Scorpio Blue EIDE drive. I'm thinking that maybe the laptop just can't recognize a drive that large, or it might be the EIDE support; IIRC it does actually support EIDE drives, and the most I can find about the capacity support is that the biggest drive you could get preinstalled in the ze4900 was 80GB. It's not an issue of speed either because the old one and the new one are both 5400RPM.
The other possibility I can think of is that I just didn't do things in the right order; I'm planning to re-do that backup and this time do the "make bootable" step the first time, instead of trusting the backup operation to do that already and then having to backtrack to finish that crucial step.
Also I checked the jumper positions on the WD site and they are the same as on my 120GB Hitachi Deskstar; I chose "Cable Select" for both.
I might just return it to Best Buy and try for a 160 gig or another 120; I was surprised when the Internet failed to dredge up any better deal than $99.95 for a 250GB EIDE notebook HDD.
^That would work if the new drive and the old had the same size, and if the old one had no bad sectors; besides, I did get everything off with XXClone.
erokky wrote:
1. It's formatted, right?
2. Are you using the right plugs?
I don't know much about laptops so I can't comment further on that.
1. It is formatted.
2. The disk is IDE, my laptop uses IDE
Are you sure that XXClone copied over the boot records? sounds like all your data is there, but the drive has no boot record.
I fixed the MBR with XXClone; XXClone isn't the problem, I used it last time I switched drives, to upgrade from the stock 40gig to a 120gig, and there were no problems.
I seriously think it's that my BIOS doesn't support 48-bit LBA (it was low-end by the standards of mid-2005), and the HP support person I chatted with didn't even think my laptop could take disks bigger than 60GB!
I returned the 250GB drive after moving the important data off, reformatting, and deleting the partition; then I drove around for about 3 hours to find a 120GB IDE notebook HDD, and I just initialized and formatted it, and now I am transferring everything all over again.
EDIT That one didn't work, so I ordered the same model as the dying one off eBay, and it just came in and worked perfectly. :-D
