busted hard drive connection?

[invasian]

Hi,

I'm looking to get some insight into a particular problem I'm running into with my toshiba satellite laptop. It appears that the problem is related to the hard drive, but it is not the hard drive itself.

So when i have the hard drive plugged in and put in a windows installation cd, nothing happens. All i get is a blank black screen. (the hard drive is clean, nothing on it, and it works; I had tested it on my desktop by buying an adapter). If i try to install linux, same thing.

Next, I decided to try booting knoppix from cd. If the hard drive is plugged in, i get the blank screen. If the hard drive isn't plugged in, then knoppix boots fine.

It's pretty clear that if the hard drive is in, it is reading from that first and does nothing. What I don't understand is what could be wrong with the hard drive? Why can't i install windows/linux on it? The rest of the computer appears to work fine when knoppix boots up. The hard drive is fine. I am confused.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Q

 

[d2arcturus]

When you want to install Windows, go into the BIOS and set the 1st boot device to CDROM, and it should boot from the CD when you restart. Unless you have done that I don't know what it is.

 

[pcgeek11]

Originally posted by: invasian
Hi,

I'm looking to get some insight into a particular problem I'm running into with my toshiba satellite laptop. It appears that the problem is related to the hard drive, but it is not the hard drive itself.

So when i have the hard drive plugged in and put in a windows installation cd, nothing happens. All i get is a blank black screen. (the hard drive is clean, nothing on it, and it works; I had tested it on my desktop by buying an adapter). If i try to install linux, same thing.

Next, I decided to try booting knoppix from cd. If the hard drive is plugged in, i get the blank screen. If the hard drive isn't plugged in, then knoppix boots fine.
It's pretty clear that if the hard drive is in, it is reading from that first and does nothing. What I don't understand is what could be wrong with the hard drive? Why can't i install windows/linux on it? The rest of the computer appears to work fine when knoppix boots up. The hard drive is fine. I am confused.

Thanks in advance for your advice.
Q

I have seen a problem like this before. Try this, put the drive in another computer, partition it and format it. Then put it back in the laptop and boot from the CDRom drive. I'm not sure what was going on but this worked for some reason. I never was able to figure it out. It was on a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop. I guess there was something on the boot record or partition table that the laptop BIOS didn't like. ????

pcgeek11

 

[invasian]

Getting into the BIOS is a problem...i can't. All i get is "press f1 to return to default settings"...i think it's a toshiba thing that they don't let you get into the bios? just my guess

I had reformatted the hard drive before trying to install windows. I did not partition it however. I don't know, i might give that a try again. But last time i did that, it messed up the desktop that i was using. Apparently, after putting in the hard drive, formatting, taking it out, and then rebooting my desktop, there was a corrupt HAL file (something to do with the hardware layer or something like that)...which i suppose was due to the addition of that notebook hard drive...had to do a reinstall and everything which was awful...but anyways, i will give that a try when i can and hopefully there will be more suggestions.

Thanks