I will check it all out, but it looks like the drive has gone bad as it works with another drive in it. 1 serial number apart, so it should be compatible. Thanks a lot, Jim
-----Original Message----- From: Windows Home/SOHO [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of James Button Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 1:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Look into Setup of laptop First - the spec for PATA-IDE ( the kind in most laptops, and 2 year old, or older PC's) drive connections allow 2 drives per cable and 2 cables on a controller So there are (normally) 2 channels (0 and 1) that can each have a master, and a slave attached. ( master/slave is forced according to the cable head if the cable is a Cable-Select' one - then all 3 connections are set to specific use One will be for the system, the other end for the master, and the one in the middle for a slave, the attached devices need to be set to cable select) For normal cables - all 3 connectors are the same, and you need to set the drive to admit to being either master, or slave Now - the boot process you can normally set the sequence in which the hardware is examined while trying to find a booting device - Floppy, CD, DVD, hard drive A-Drive, USB, Firewire, etc. Some systems allow/require you to specify particular hard drives by connection 0-master, 0-slave 1-slave 1-master or whatever order you want! So - is your hard drive connected as a slave? If it is connected as normally done - as 0-master, then.. you probably have a duff drive, or controller and - you can attach it as a slave, or secondary master, or as a USB drive to another PC to check if it is readable If FDISK, or Manage Storage-Management facility see the drive - then it's probably OK, and the laptop is naff. If the drive has no 'visible bootable partitions' then that would explain the system not booting from it, but it should still have been seen within the BIOS/setup. You could put a replacement drive in the PC - and check if it is seen in the setup... BUT if the laptop controller has gone bad it may corrupt or kill the drive.. so it's better to check the drive from the laptop first So - that's boot from CD or floppy and check with FDISK if you can boot from CD, then that would indicate the PC is OK, and the drive is naff and do check if the system will boot from CD without the hard drive attached/interfaced in case the drive is bad, and stops the cd booting If you can boot from a windows CD with the drive connected, can the CD booted system see the hard drive JimB -- ---------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Is your picture included in the Official Win-Home List Members Profiles Page? http://www.besteffort.com/winhome/Profiles.html If not, write to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ---------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Is your picture included in the Official Win-Home List Members Profiles Page? http://www.besteffort.com/winhome/Profiles.html If not, write to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
