New hard drive not found

[mikeh]

an anyone help? I have a 6 yr old Dell laptop, which last week failed to boot. The diagnostics came up with lots of hard drive errors, so I bought a new one, exactly the same.

I haven't done this before - I assumed I'd be able to simply swap them over, put in the WinXP installation disk and start installing windows. But it tells me there's no hard drive. Any ideas please?

[LinkindinkinPark]

can you see the drive in the bios?

[mikeh]

It doesn't show in the bios, and there doesn't seem to be anyway of changing it, or selecting a different type. (I have read about changing SATA to IDE etc, but I don't have any options at all.)

I have also read that some bios menus hide stuff like that, so I'm feeling a bit stuck. Any help please?

[LinkindinkinPark]

ok, you need to sort out the jumpers on the drive

 

drive make and model please

[mikeh]

Thanks Linkindinkin

 

Hitachi DK23EA-30 30Gb Laptop HDD .

 

Jumpers are some sort of linkage across certain pins on the main connection?

 

Looking forward to your reply.....

[LinkindinkinPark]

jumper settings here

 

Hitachi Hard Disk Drives

 

probably easier to copy the settings off the old drive

[Dalo Harkin]

While you are checking the jumper, double check the connectors to the HDD at the same time.

[mikeh]

Doh!

 

I now see the old drive had a huge jumper block thing on it. I've put it on the new one, and the bios recognizes it. Thanks for the pointers.

As to whether I can make further progress, I will try tomorrow.

 

Thanks again.

[Dalo Harkin]

No problem,

 

Any issues you know where we are :)

[mike8888]

hello

 

glad you managed to resolve this