Laptop boot problem

Arcex

Senior member
Mar 23, 2005
722
0
0
I searched for a similar situation to this but couldn't find anything so I apologize if this has been dealt with before, but...


My friend has a Compaq Presario R3000. Her husband tried to upgrade the hard drive in it from a 30 GB 4200 RPM to an 80 GB 5400 RPM. When they try to boot from it it gets past the POST and then... nothing but a blank screen. BIOS HDD test comes up clean, and it does recognize the hard drive.

Now, I'm fairly certain the laptop just can't handle the hard drive even though it can recognize it, I checked HP's site and even called Tech Support (and spoke to an actual American, who spoke ENGLISH as a first language, shocking!) but they said they don't know the specifics as to the max hard drive that laptop can handle, but they guess the problem is what I said above.

The only reason I post here is because I've never had a laptop or PC that didn't give me an error message, either on screen or beep error code, when it had a hardware problem like that. Does anyone who has encountered something like this think it's the hard drive or something else?
 

Double Trouble

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
9,270
103
106
Have you checked to see if the BIOS on the laptop can be updated? Often the bios updates on those lappy's fix issues like that. Sounds like the hardware is working fine, but a BIOS incompatibility is messing things up.
 

Arcex

Senior member
Mar 23, 2005
722
0
0
Nope, BIOS is updated. I'm thinking it just can't handle the HD. Gotta love HP for not knowing the specs on their own laptop.