Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Wow, congratulations Dell...

They changed the optical drives, the good working ones are the 1.8amps and the new ones they ship are 1.5amps... and the model # is not the same (of course)

When I boot up my DVD on the 1.5amp, I need 6 reboots in order to work without BSOD, and on an another laptop, with a 1.8amp, works first time.

Both laptops are brand new, first bootup.

I would've like them to notice customers when they change something in the hardware configuration. Fortunately, I had a backup optical drive, but it's not everyone's case. Good luck if you've got the same problems as me. Also, it could be Toureasyrider's problem too, if the optical drive has the same specs as my faulty ones.

 

Actually, the best one is the Panasonic 1.6Amps. It doesn't make any noise when the laptop turn on/come back from sleep, and save power when used over the 1.8amps.

Anyway, just call and ask for the specific model that you want, if they can't ask for the supervisor. BUT the BSOD means that your hardware is broken.. (possibly motherboard, or manufacture problem on the optical drive). And suggest to get that one changed.

You must understand that manufacture problems can occur in life, and of course it's not Dell fault is the manufacture of the optical drive.
Sadly, when it's not aimed at consumers at retail level, some companies besides to cut on quality to have the proper number of optical drive in the box, and just send that. Now, normally changing company is the best solution for Dell, but that means delays for people that order it, and well.. won't solve anything as the other company will do the same.

 

Thanks for your comments. But what I'm pointing here is that we received 15 laptops with those non-working 1.5amps optical drives. I don't think they are all screwed because we had the same errors on each one of them, simply cheap or not fully compatible with something inside the E6400.

I can confirm that since I use the 1.8amps, it works like a charm. WooHoo!

 

I have yet another problem. I have two Seagate FreeAgent Go external drives.

They both work fine. But as soon as I plug in both of them, only one will appear at the Hard Drives tab in the Computer window (Windows 7).

Actually both of the drives seem to be recognised, they are both being listed in Devices and Printers - but via right click only one of them is accessable.

Seagate Manager also lists both - one with the current partition, model and free space - the other with partition UNKNOWN and 0 bytes free space.

This could be a problem regarding
a) Seagate not allowing multiple devices plugged in
b) Windows 7
c) my Latitude E6400

Does anybody else using the E6400 has had a similar problem?

Edit: this problem seems to be one of W7: in disk management it says "this disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online"

Though both drives are FreeAgent Gos, they should have different signatures, shouldn't they? oO

Btw, via right click --> online the second drive also is connected.

 

Sounds like your drives will need a firmware upgrade to support Win7.
You may need to wait for Win7 to be release before Seagate supports it, therefore release such firmware.

 

Can you rename one of the drives so they don't have the same name?

Can your E6400 handle both drives concurrently? There is only so much power available from all the USB ports. If you use an external powered USB hub, do both drives then show up?

 

Well, the right-click --> online made everything work. Even after reboot the setting was not lost. I copied stuff from one external drive to the other (40gb), no problems so far.
Seems to be a safety measure or something from W7.

 

Ive been trying to get my raidmax esata enclosures to work with no success. I have seagate notebook hard drives in them and they work with my hp 16t notebook fine. Im Using windows 7 32 with the july intel drivers and a14 bios. On post it says unknown device and wont boot. And when ever they are plugged in the hd light stays on continueously and windows wont boot up or shut down with them installed.

 

3 things:

enclosure problem - either under volt or cable problem
hard drive problem
driver problem - from your esata cable / enclosure

 

I agree with MDR8850.

I have Win7 64-bit, and my eSATA with my external harddrive works just fine.