Laptop refuses to detect hard drive with CD drive in!

Laptop is an Acer Aspire 1640. 2.26GHz, 2gb RAM.

Laptop was working fine with the factory Hitachi HTS541680J9AT00 80gb drive.

I purchased a Samsung HM160HC 160gb drive as it's supposed to be the fastest PATA laptop drive available.

I put it in and the laptop just kept saying "no operating system found" with the XP disk in the drive.

I tried several optical drives and got the same issue with all of them.

I then hooked a USB optical drive up and it wouldn't boot from it.

I removed the internal optical drive and the system then booted from the USB drive and loaded Windows fine.

I just assumed it was a fluke and once Windows was done loading I removed the USB drive, installed the factory internal optical again and turned it on...

"No operating system found".

This is where I'm stuck. If I remove the optical the system boots into Windows fine. There were no issues like this with the other hard drive.

I have tried setting the hard drive as Master, Slave, and Cable Select with no change.

Laptop has the newest BIOS.

Samsung does not offer firmware updates on their hard drives.

Help!

 

This sounds like it could be a PATA master/slave conflict. Check the Hitachi to see how it is jumpered, and set the Samsung jumper the same way. Let us know how this turns out. Good luck!!

 

The Hitachi has no jumpers (set as master then).

I have tried that setting on the Samsung. I also tried slave and cable select to no avail

 

Check your boot priority settings in the BIOS. Temporarily disable booting from optical drive if you can.

 

I have it set to only boot from hard drives.

I guess I just can't use this hard drive in this laptop. I always thought IDE was IDE but I guess not.

 

does the bios detect hardisk?

 

The BIOS on this laptop does not show IDE devices. It doesn't at POST either if I hit ESC. Counts RAM, checks the keyboard, etc... but doesn't list drives.

Doesn't make it easy does it?

 

Hi,

I have noticed exactly the same thing trying to replace Hitachi with Samsung HM160HC. Tried cable select same problem. Works fine with another PATA drive that is smaller just not with the 160GB.

You know its not going to work when you see no entry alongside "HDD Model Name" in the first screen of the BIOS. (BIOS Version 3A05). It would seem the BIOS in this model just cannot cope with a larger hard disk drive.

 

I recommend the following solutions:
Go to RPC1.org to get the latest firmware for your Optical Drive check the model first.
Go to Acer Website to download and flash the latest BIOS.
The problem could be a firmware bug.