Re: Inspiron 2500 hard drive replacement

"Christopher Muto" <muto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:13lvqdoe162mt2c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
do you have the latest bios in the latitude 2500? a15 is the latest one, a11 and a12 had changes with regard to hard disk issues.

The bios is original, whatever that is. I was reluctant to try that (and risk killing the whole PC) if anyone knew it was pointless. If upgrades are still available, I will have a go. Thanks for the suggestion.

also, did you get this drive new or used?

The replacement drive is new.

and have to tried to create a bootable hard drive diagnostics cd using a download from the hard drive manufacturers web site?

I can do that (I think I already have one) - but I expect it to pass fine, its the old PC bits I am suspicious of.

Thanks for the response. Martin

"Martin Gerhold" <martin.gerhold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:475fc175$1_1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In trying to help a friend with a circa 2002 Inspiron 2500 with a failed 20GB Hitachi drive, I encouraged him to purchase a new drive (Western Digital 120Gb Scorpio). It seems the BIOS has trouble with this - it is very slow to respond to F2 on bootup, the drive is identified (by model number), but no drive info is available (this seems to be a feature lacking in the Phoenix BIOS).

Booting from the recovery Cd and installing XP gets past formatting the drive (to NTFS) and installing some XP files, but on the first re-boot of the installation process the system fails to boot from the hard drive - it reports something like "No system disc", and hangs.

Rebooting from the CD juts repeats the install process, offering to overwrite the files it obviously finds on the drive. I tried creating a 20GB partition (in case 120 was too much) and installing to that, with no change. Putting the drive in a USB enclosure and connecting to my PC shows a believable set of Windows files & folders, and XP's disk management shows the drive as 'Active'.

Have we purchased a drive the BIOS can never boot from? We would be happy with a <120GB available size, but 20GB disks are hard to come by now! Am I likely to get anywhere trying FIXBOOT or FIXMBR from the recovery console off the CD?

I will try the Dell forum this pm (I registered last night), but can't access it from here (work!).

Any ideas appreciated! Martin




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