Replacing Lappy HD

[Krez]

Hey everyone,

After a few years of use (or misuse? ), my bro's Toshiba Satellite laptop has stopped working. I took a look at it and figured out that the HD died. I told him that and without consulting me he went out and bought an 80GB Seagate laptop HD. I tried installing XP Pro on it and no go, it gives me an error and reboots. I know the XP disc works fine, I just reformatted my comp a few days ago. I've tested the Seagate HD in my new Gateway laptop and it works fine, although I haven't tried to install windows on it. I looked around on Toshiba's site and it says the HD used the Ata-4 interface, and this Seagate uses Ata-6. So I'm wondering if there might be some sort of compatibility issue with the old laptop and the new HD. I'm at school right now so I can't tell you what the laptop's model number is, I'll get that later today. Thanks for your help!

-Krez

 

[jkresh]

Does the bios see the drive and show the right amount of space? If not then that might be an issue, if the bios can see it then its probably compatible.

 

[Jiggz]

ATA interface are always backward compatible. In this case, the ATA-6 will be backward compatible to ATA-4. Do a clean format and if possible use the CD's that came with the laptop to do a re-install. If you do not have the re-installation CD anymore, you can try using XP Pro for an install but you will need the drivers for the laptop. I'm not sure how old is the system but it could also be that the bios has limitation on the size of the hdd. If this is the case, you might want to check for an update bios.

 

[Krez]

Hey there, sorry for not responding. The laptop was having some trouble booting and I finally fixed it. But I've come across another problem. I've got two laptop harddrives, an 80gb seagate, and a 30gb HP that I found. I've tried to install windows on both HDs (which are confirmed working), but when I get to the formatting options something odd happens. It says that there's 331498MB available unpartitioned space. 331498MB=323.72852GB... Unless I found a magical hard drive that has more space than advertised, something's wrong here. Confused, I rebooted and tried again; still the same. Tried in both HDs and with windows 2000 and XP. Same again. BIOS is so basic it won't even tell me the basics So what's wrong here?

I also found the lapop's model name, which is a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S254. I don't know if this will be helpful or not but here's the spec sheet
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi...kimfcgfkceghdgngdgnj.0

Thanks for your help!

 

[Krez]

Anyone have any idea for this problem?

 

[0roo0roo]

use an laptop ide to pc ide adaptor..about 3 bucks at frys.
format/partition the drive,perhaps dump the install dir of windows on a second partition for faster install.
it should work.
slipstream xp2 on xp and install from that maybe more up to date drivers.
make sure the drive is setup in bios. i stuck an 80gb in an old sony z505 laptop once, and its original drive was a 12gb it works fine.

 

[jaqie]

I actually have a somewhat similar laptop, toshiba TE2000 (p3m 1ghz)

A few quick things to do:
first, use DBAN to zap the drive clean of all partitions and data. a single erase wipe should do it. It's a good practice to do in the first place for all drives. If it stalls or hangs on an area, then you know the drive has surface defects and needs RMA'd, this is also a possible problem, then try a clean install.

A possible band-aid if the problems persist is an old tool called dynamic drive overlay... you may want to read into that a little bit, but it would be much better to find out what the real problem is and fix it. With this, google would definitely be your friend, a few good search terms would be your laptop's model number along with a terse question of what is wrong... something like "toshiba xyz drive size problem" or somesuch. Trial and error with searches may result in a ton of good info on this.

~edit~
One last thing: I always install xp to a 20GB partition on the drive, then install all packs and such, then make a D: partition to store all files and install large programs (games et al) to. This may be a good move, as older OSes have issues with very large partitions especially on older hardware.