On 14/04/11 23:51, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Assuming you have eliminated the obvious problems with poor drive connections and the machine is stable with the original drive then I am not sure what the problem would be.
The machine was stable with the original drive (well as stable as a Windows PC can be :-) but I haven't put it back to test again, in case I have damaged something in my upgrade attempts - I don't want to lose what's on that disk.
I now have a second hand 80GB HDD to play with so I'll see where that gets me.
Does the machine have a "dongle" between the SATA connector and the drivebay ?
No, it connects directly, as far as I can tell.
The caddy it fits into had one screw into the old HDD that was far too tight - even with a decent screwdriver it wouldn't come out without chewing up the screw and in the end I had to twist the caddy off leaving one screw in place in the old drive. However I can't see anything in the caddy that would cause me a problem.
Is there any pattern to the POST issue, does it only ever happen from a cold boot rather than a reboot etc ?
Not really a pattern as such, not least one that I'd be confident describing as I haven't tested enough times to rule out coincidences. But it seems fine from a cold restart (in terms of the BIOS seeing the drive and allowing me to boot from it), and I'd say about 50% of reboots (usually caused by something in the O/S complaining about disk errors) result in the BIOS not seeing the drive, for it to reappear on a subsequent reboot.
If you still think it is a drive capacity issue try something < 137GB to avoid the requirement of 48 bit LBA but as far as I can remember those wouldn't prevent the BIOS from detecting the presence of a drive during POST and I can't remember ever seeing a SATA chipset that wasn't capable of 48bit LBA
I'll see if the 80GB disk works. Is there any likelihood of any BIOS parameters helping? I don't recall the options, but if there's something to look for I'll have another go.
Coincidentally, a colleague at work spent most of yesterday trying to install Vista onto a new 320GB drive in an HP laptop, failing with similar problems only in the end to revert to the original 80GB disk, although that was an older laptop.