New Laptop HD Bios doesn't see

[morganfalk]

I have a Gateway M460 Laptop w/ 40GB - bought a Seagate 5400, ata-6, 8mb cache - simply because it was on sale (kind of like shoes).

Anyway, I've had it for 6 mos or so and haven't installed it bcs I have 3 boys. Got rid of one (college) and decided I would take a day to pop it in, load all the software and files, etc.

OF COURSE, it didn't work that way. oh, and by the way, it says all over the box, "this hard drive should be installed by a professional only" of course when I read that it wasn't going near a professional!

My first thought was the motherboard doesn't support 60gb, but come on...this machine was delivered to me in May 2003 by Gateway after they had .....ed up 2 other ones. (Gateway is not my friend) Anyway, if it doesn't support 60gb then I'll have to flash the bios. Noooooo........

I went to G'way and downloaded the appropriate flashing equipment and then got cold feet. If my flash trashed my machine, I'd be dead in the water. Changing the motherboard in a laptop is not easy, and that college tuition would preclude my purchasing another notebook pc anytime soon.

Soooo.... here I am somewhat longwinded, but in need of other suggestions of things to try before I start living on the edge.

I am currently running XP pro w/sp2
I have a Pheonix Bios (and will look up the # if it's essential)
8Mbit CMOS Boot Block Flash Memory
SMBios 2.3 Support
ACPI 2.0 Support
Pentium Centrino 400Mhz side bus speed
768Mb RAM
40GB Fujitsu HD

Thanks, Morgan

[lasher511]

Have you actually tried plugging in the hard drive and installing windows XP on it?

[morganfalk]

Have you actually tried plugging in the hard drive and installing windows XP on it?

Thank you so much for your suggestion. Unfortunately, I cannot get to the drive to load anything.

That's how I knew I had a problem. I installed the new hard drive into my laptop. Turned it on, and nothing.

The drive didn't spin for more than a split second, the screen stayed black - no bios, no error messages, nothing.

I removed the new 60Gb drive and put in my "old" 40Gb drive. Every thing works fine. No "wobbles" at all. Wireless is fine. I can run several programs at once without over taxing the cpu as I would expect. No changes in the bios - it's set to boot from the HD.

Did the swap again - couldn't see how the power source to the HD could be the problem as the connections on the two drives are identical.

Thank you for your suggestions - please keep 'em comin'

Morgan