[Herefordshire] Re: Laptop HD Replacement

[Chris Owens]

Hi Box and anyone who likes BIOS mechanics!

    Mark Broadbent has been keeping a kindly eye on me with the installation
of a new hard drive for the (in)famous laptop and has suggested if you are
at the meeting to-night you might be able to help with the following which
renders the machine useless.

Replaced HITACHI_DK23CA-30(PM) 30GB HD with Seagate Momentus 42 60GB
U100 4200rpm Drive (ST960821A) without difficulty. On start up both  POST
and CMOS displays showed that the Primary Master Drive to have re-set to
TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-R2002-(PM). No amount of fiddling around in SET -UP would
reveal the Seagate Title as a choice in any selection menu and setting
Master Drive Selection to Auto had any effect. BUT without any warning on a
re-power up the POST Screen showed HD0 as Seagate and CMOS Set-up confirmed
the Primary Master as Seagate and Primary Slave as Atapi CD-ROM, the machine
worked fine and I was able to partition and format the new HD for Windows
and Linux without any difficulty.

    Using the Hi-Grade Recovery Disk to install Windows 98 (I suspect a cut
down version) was partly
successful since it ended up with display size problem (640x480) which could
not
be changed in Control Panel (seemed to be incomplete) but that's another
problem. However on the next re-boot (post windows installation) the POST
summary showed Primary Master having reverted to Atapi CD ROM and the boot
failed. After a lot of non specific tinkering in CMOS and running through
menus and
powering up again it regained a corrupted setting this time POST showed
Atapi CD ROM as Primary Master and CMOS showed the Primary Master as Seagate
and Primary Slave as Atapi CD-ROM. The machine went on to boot up
successfully and was perfectly usable. On the next power-up (PhoenixBIOS 4.0
Release 6.0 Version 0113)  POST hung after mouse initialisation (presumably
between 8Bh and A8h without any beeps), F2 doesn't enter Set-Up but after
about 6 minutes Error Message 0200: Failure Fixed Disk 0 is displayed. F1 to
resume goes to CMOS Screen which shows Atapi CD ROM as Primary Master and
the machine crashes with 'Operating System not found'

Hi-Grade think it is loose connection to the I/O board but I can't see that
myself and as Mark says upgrading the BIOS may be the last thing I do. Has
anyone any other ideas.

See everyone to-night with my b........ laptop

Chris Owens



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