Laptop NEC ready 340T hard drive problem...please help!!

[CtK]

Im trying to restore my friends notebook using the restore disk and it keeps giving me this error

Unable to prepare hard drive. Your system hard drive might be defective, its jumper may be incorrectly set or the cable may be loose.

how do i open the laptop??
and if i need a new HD is it easy to replace??

are there anything important i should know about b4 i try this??

please let me know

thanks

 

[ZZZZZZ]

First, before you go opening up that puppy, what is the reason you needed to do the restore?

 

[JohnnyPC]

I wouldn't worry too much about any jumpers being the wrong place especially if the thing has never been apart. I would reccomend reseating the hard drive. It's usually located under a panel on the bottom or it pulls out the side...could be a connection problem. Maybe get a boot disk made off you home system Win9x, use that to boot and see if you can fdisk the drive. If you can fdisk it then you should be able to reboot and then format it. At which point NECs stuff might start working again. No luck with the 9x boot disk then goto like maxtor or western digital and get ther diag tool....doesn't matter what type you actually have in the laptop, they should all work the same. There is a HD Diag program that I know of on the WD site called WDdiag. Run the test on the disk and see what comes up...after this I would maybe assume the HD to be faulty...