Hard Drive Crash, New Hard Drive Install

[Maat van Plaat]

Hi there,

This is maat's wife. My laptop harddrive crashed and I bought a new one. I have windows 98. I have installed the harddrive correctly i hope. How do i reinstall windows? I have read on the internet but can't seem to get it right. Window is not recognising harddrive or something.

Please can someone who knows give a step by step guide or point me to easy to understand information?

Thank you.

Z

[Ade]

Hi!

Does the PC boot up?
If not try to get into the BIOS setup (press F2 or ESC or F1 or something when prompted during the initial boot stages)
Find your boot up options and tell it to look at the CD drive first (probably D: )
Then stick you Win98 CD in the cdrom drive and restart the computer.

If it is booting, what do you see on the screen?

Hope this helps...

Ade

[Maat van Plaat]

Hi Ade,

Thanks for your response.

I have booted with eergency disk in floppy drive(primary boot). I then select the option to start computer with CD support. It then runs and says that hard drive cannot be found(I think - I am not at the laptop at this time thus can't confirm exact wording).

I assume the new harddrive can't be read because its not formatted yet.

Hope this helps.

Regards.

Z

[Ade]

Hi Z

Formatted or not the PC should be able to 'see' the drive.
If you can get into the BIOS setup and see if the drive is known to the system.

If it is then you should be able to run fdisk to format and partition the disk. This depends if you have fdisk on your recovery disk.
There may be some other tool on there that you can use.

If the BIOS says that there is no hard disk [0] then I would suggest that it is not properly connected. Can you hear it spin up when you power on?

BTW I'd be surprised if the disk wasn't formatted in some shape or form.

Ade

[Maat van Plaat]

Thanks Ade. I will try that when i get home tonight.

Hubby normally solves these things but he is in deppest darkest Africa at the moment and I cn't even call to ask.

Thanks again and hopefully next post will be to say a big thanks.

Regards,

Z.

[picanin]

Mrs MvP is the drive correctly connected? You may well ahve the cable the wrong way around OR the jumpers may be incorrectly set on the drive. It should be set up as a master and not a slave. The cable connecting the hard drive to the mother boards will usually have a red stripe on one side. That side should be connected to the side of the hard drive connector with a pin labelled "1"

If the BIOS says the HD cannot be found then using FDISK, FORMAt or any other software wont help. You will need to make sure that the BIOS is set up to auto detect the drive too.

As a final thought if the laptop is pretty old then it may not recognise the drive because of its capacity.

[Maat van Plaat]

Hi Pic,

Thanks for advice and sorry for the late response.

I did double check the connection of the harddrive back into the laptop. I also thought of the possibility of the harddrive not being recognized because of the capacity but when checking it in a hotdrive, it was was recognized either(USB2.0 connecting to hubbies desktop) --> XP recognizes the new hardware when pugged into USB but drive is not displayed e.g. E/F(can't remember offhand).

I have deided to send it back and let them test it. I've heard there is a masive failure rate on HD due to many manufacturers not doing quality control to reduce costs and subsequently acepting the return for replacement.

Hope I've done the right thing.

Regards,

Z

[Ade]

Hope it works out...
let us know
A