PCA Forums

I'm really puzzled by this. It's a Pentium2 laptop. HDD is bad. Managed to recover the data to a Ghost image & copied it to another dirve. Put the replacement drive in the lappy and it won't boot. BIOS recognizes the drive and detects it as the proper size, but no boot. I get no error message it just locks up after POST.

The drive is smaller than the original so there should be no issue of compatibility, especially since BIOS detects it properly.

There's nothing wrong with the data on the drive - I put the drive in another computer just to make sure and I can boot into Safe Mode no problem.

Dell does use one of those funky non-DOS partitions in the beginning of the drive, but that copied over just fine too from the Ghost image, so I can't see that being an issue.

Took another HDD and just formatted it and made it DOS bootable, then put that in the lappy and it STILL won't boot. WTF??

I haven't yet tried to format the drive from the lappy itself because I don't have a floppy or CD drive for it (they're removable and the client hasn't given them to me yet - he has to find them).

My next step is to try to format and make the drive bootable from the lappy itself and if that works then I can just install Windows clean from the lappy (although it would have been nice to use the old install).

It's puzzling the hell out of me. I'm beginning to wonder if the laptop is "locked" to the old drive. IBM does that on some of their premium laptops. Hopefully by partitioning and formatting it from the lappy itself it'll work.

Anyone run into something like this?

Hey FP, I've got a Dell CPi P2300mhz lappy
it originally had a 4 gig hd in it but when I got it from the guy here on the board some stuff got mixed around so he slapped a 10 gig into it for me
It arrived formatted and I installed win98, but it was botched(my fault ) so I formatted again and reinstalled and it worked without a hitch...

the trick that I had to get around was I didn't remember that it came with a cable to hook the FD up to a com port in the back... so I needed a CD drive AND a floppy to boot from (my win98 doesn't boot)
so I made a win98Se boot disk from bootdisk.com and then used nero to make a boot CD

after that, my worries were over
I think if you just format it IN the laptop you'll be good to go.
What about Bios settings though? everything good in there?
I'm guessing it's pretty close to the same as mine and I had to fiddle around in there for a few min...

but definately, try a format in the laptop itself, that should do it

You guys are in the wrong forum, this belongs in the mobil computing area