Hard drive issues with latitude 120L

Hello,

I have a dell latitude 120L laptop and am having issues with installing windows on it.

The windows installation completes for the first stage but when the laptop restarts the installation restarts.

I checked CMOS and it wasnt recognising the hdd however windows essentially installed and was able to format the HDD.

I decided to take out the dvd rom drive from the laptop and windows booted.
When the dvd drive is replaced the system says that there isnt a bootable device. From this i can see that the hdd and the dvd drive are conflicting.

Is there a way i can fix this? would the bios need reflashing? or better yet has aonyone else had this issue?

Thanks for your time


smurf....

 

Well, you should see if the hard drive is bad or if the machine itself is bad... can you try using another drive in the 120L or using your current drive in a known good machine?

 

Really? did you read my first post in anyway shape or form?

When i take the dvd rom out windows boots!!!!

this leads me to believe that the hard drive is working and there maybe a conflict with the dvd rom address and the hard drivew address...

 

Has the optical drive been changed from the original? My suspicion is that the notebook has an IDE HDD and optical drive both sharing the same channel. This means that there can be issues with master / slave / cable select.

The optical drive setting is in the firmware but you should be able to put a jumper on the HDD to change it from master to slave. See either a label on the HDD or data on the manufacturer's website.

John

 

Thank you for the reply. i will take a look and see what i can do.
thanks again