Laptop hangs after new HDD, BIOS

[Camion]

I have some wierd problems since I put a new HDD Fujitsu 20 GB, (very quiet!) in a Dell Latitude CPi 266XT laptop. I flashed the BIOS with help from the Dell boards. Windows 98SE seemed to load okay, along with Office 2000, and Norton Systemworks Pro 2003. Sometimes it just freezes, and I have to turn it off and back on. Other times I can move the cursor around but nothing happens when I click, or it happens about a minute later. When I open "My Computer" the window pops up right away, but it is empty for a minute or so, then the icons fill in. Sometimes the CD drive is shown in the My Computer window, and sometimes not. Sometimes it shows two CDROMS, a D and an E. When it is not shown I can go to System Information>Components>Problem Devices and it says "This device has a problem" in reference to the CDROM controller. If I remove it ( Mitsui) using Device Manager, another CDROM appears in Device Manager where the Mitsui was, a Torsan. Remove it, reboot, find new hardware and around and around we go. I think I have more than one problem to state the obvious. Does anyone know where to start? Thanks.

 

[Rav3n]

I think getting rid of Norton usually helps problems... I was a loyal user of it for a few years, then I realized every time I pressed One Button Check-up there were always a slew of "problems" . However, I never seemed to see the difference after it "repaired" things, except that I lost a few hours of my life... Also, Norton tends to load some DLL's upon starting windows, and those have never been friendly to me, constantly causing crashes.

Another thing you might want to try, Scandisk - thorough - maybe in dos - yuo might have some bad sectors.

Umm, make sure all the cables in your laptop are plugged in securely - you may have accidentally loosened some cables when you were inside - though I doubt it.

I am just groping now...I have no idea... but that stuff above is pretty general and MIGHT help you. Good luck!