compaq 1800t hard drive upgrade help

[seanlong]

Hello,

I am trying to upgrade my compaq 1800t with a new hard drive (60 gig ibm) and it won't boot from the new hd. I copied the contents of the old hd over using some software I got from another hd upgrade, and tried to reboot but nothing happens. It tries to access the HD and halts with no error at all.

If I boot using winxp cd, it will see the hard drive contents just fine, and will even do a recovery installation without complaint, but when I try to reboot and boot from the hard drive, it just hangs as soon as it tries to access the HD on bootup.

I suspect it's a bios issue since the 1800t apparently has a 30 gig max hd size, but I know there are ways around it. Some hard drive manufacturers used to distribute a drive bios overlay for this exact reason, but I can't seem to find them.

Any ideas? TIA!

 

[Arcanedeath]

Update the bios for your laptop and if it won't support larger than 32gb drives you'll need to get DFT from HGST and load a drive overlay to get it to work.

 

[ericboo]

Sounds like you are right on the money. I tried scanning Hitachi's site and they have a Drive Fitness Test.

 

[trikster2]

just a data point.

I am typing this on a 18XL3, a version of the 1800T with a 600mhz P3.

Upgraded it from the stock 18gb hard drive to a 60gb samsung with no problems.

I did a fresh install of XP though....

 

[thunderroller]

you need to run windows installation on new drive

 

[seanlong]

thunderroller,

I figured it out before I read your post, but yes that was the trick. Apparently when I took the bare drive and used a copy utility to transfer the old drive's data to the new drive, it wasn't formatting the drive correctly. Here's what I ended up doing.

I put in the new drive, and ran windows xp setup as a new installation. After it formatted the hard drive and rebooted however, I realized that the drive was now bootable so all I needed to do now to save the old windows installation was copy the old info over and everything would be great. So I re-installed the old drive, attached the new drive using a USB external drive adaptor, and copied the old drive to the new drive, but didn't let the copy utility reformat. That way it kept the good bootable format from the aborted windows installation, but had all the old data and windows installation.

When it was done I just swapped drives again and it worked great. The laptop is faster and more responsive, has 3 times the storage space, and even better the new drive is almost completely silent. The old 20 gig drive had developed a really loud whine over the last 3 years and although it still worked, the noise was just as irritating as the lack of storage space.

Thanks for the reply though. I now know that in the future, I should probably always use a fresh windows xp setup installation to get the drive formatted and set up even if all I'm going to do is just copy the old drive over to the new drive.

 

[Paq]

I'm glad things worked out for you and the laptop. Today, I actually just bought an 1800t from a college student, and I'd also like to upgrade the hard drive (it's a 12-gig). If you don't mind me asking, which IBM hard drive did you use?