Hard drive/other hardware question - Technology

Smokey · 02-10-2011, 07:40 PM

So a friend of mine gave me his laptop to work on, cause its all messed up.
Anyways, I got everything ready to do a reformat on the damn thing.
And as soon as it asks me if i want to proceed to install XP, I press enter.
Then it showed me a screen saying that there wasn't any hard drive discs detected.
So common sense says, the hard drive is done.
Could all of this have effected other hardware as well? Or will I just find out after I change the hard drive?

Motorcharge · 02-11-2011, 01:19 AM

No, a HD failure won't effect other hardware. Try replacing cables to the HD first (IDE or Sata) it could just be that one of those has died.

If more hardware is messed up it's likely the power supply failed and when they do they tend to take out other parts. At least that's the case with desktops, not sure if that's the same case with laptops since they use a power brick in the cord.

Smokey · 02-11-2011, 01:29 AM

Thanks man.

Rick91981 · 02-13-2011, 12:15 PM

Go into the BIOS and see if the drive shows there. If I had to guess I think you might be trying to load XP onto a SATA drive. If that is the case you probably need to get the drivers for the controller and put them onto a floppy disk and while XP is beginning the setup you will see a prompt to "press F6 if you need to istall a third party SCSI or RAID driver." While it doesn't specifically mention SATA, it does apply to SATA drivers as well. Seeing as how this is a laptop, you may need to use an external USB floppy drive.

subs · 02-14-2011, 09:56 PM

Is it a new HD that was replaced and needs to be reformatted?

HirensBootCD or GParted Live will run as a LiveCD - from these LiveCD systems you can reformat the drive to NTFS, FAT32, etc.