Calling all computer geeks...

[Medsker]

OK so I have a HP laptop dv9000. It has a second slot for a hard drive so I thought I would get one and hook it up to back things up, etc. I bought a Hitachi 80 gig 7200 rpm thing off of e-bay. I decided to first off install it as the primary drive since the stock one is 5400 rpm. I put in the primary slot and then put my recovery cd in and couldn't get my computer to find the hard drive. I then pulled it back out and put it in the secondary position and the old one back in the primary position. I started the computer back up and it said it found new hardware. I went computer manager and it wanted to initialize it...I hit ok and it gave me an error. When I viewed it in the log it said "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D." I tried to find something on google to fix things but can't. My computer illiterate guess is that until my hard drive gets initialized I can't format it and until I format it I can't write to it.

So does anyone have any ideas to try. I checked for jumpers and there isn't any on the hard drive. What is initializing? Can I do it on another laptop and then put it in mine? Help? Please?

Medsker

 

[Brad Yates]

Download ubuntu , burn it to a CD (use ISOBurn if you don't have anything), then remove the old hard drive and stick the new one in the secondary spot (or primary I guess). Turn on the computer and after it loads use gparted to partition it. (if you need more help on this I can explain it in detail or there's lots of tutorials out there) Partition it to FAT32 or if you really want, NTFS. And voila. If for some reason it didn't recognize the drive in either spot, then you've got a big problem.

 

[Rusted]

I would try a boot floppy first and see if you can FDISK it. If you can then try a format through windows again. Or find a copy of partition magic to see if it can partition and format the new disk.

 

[78mitsu]

make sure the pins fully engage the hdd, the hdd is powered through the same connector, It's a good Idea to boot to GPARTED because it will let you see the disks, but it isn't invasive unless you want it to be.


Did you take the battery out and diffuse all the caps before you removed the HDD if not you may have damaged both HDDs.

 

[Medsker]

Thanks for the replies, I've been playing with Ubuntu on my other laptop so I already have that on a disk so I think I'll try that first. If it doesn't I'll try the other suggestions.

By the way this just scares me "Did you take the battery out and diffuse all the caps before you removed the HDD if not you may have damaged both HDDs." I have no idea how to diffuse the caps. I did turn it off and wait for two minutes...ok probably one minute.

Thanks for the responses...I'll let you know what happens after I play with it tonight.

Medsker

 

[Brad Yates]

I have no idea what that means either. I doubt the hard drives are broken. I swap hard drives all the time (sometimes even when the computer it on )

 

[78mitsu]

I have no idea what that means either. I doubt the hard drives are broken. I swap hard drives all the time (sometimes even when the computer it on )

If you know how to swap a disk hot, you can, the procedure for swapping out a HDD in a laptop is to remove ac power remove battery press and hold the power key for 15 continuous seconds, then you can remove the disk, laptop HDD's are powered from the same pinset that is used for the bus, which makes them particuarly succeptible to damage from a power surge from a discharging capacitor. There is a live cd for GParted that I use all the time, it'll tell you if the disk is salvagable.