Clean install on Momentus XT HD????

I just received my M11xR1 from Dell with the 160G HD, as well as a Momentus XT 500G form new egg.

I swapped the drives and used the Win7 CD that came with the system to do a fresh install; it went through the setup and at the end it said that the CD does not have the proper drivers for the new drive and cannot complete the install.

I looked around the forum and did not find anything specific.

Has anyone else had this happen to them; and if so what was the fix?

Is there something I should enable/disable in the BIOS?

Thanks,

 

That is very very strange. You should not need "drivers" at all for a replacement hard drive. Drivers are used for the hard drive controller on the motherboard, but not the drive itself.

What is the message specifically? Any way you could take a screenshot with a camera phone or something?

 

I had this issue with the momentus xt i just imaged.

I reimaged it, reinstalled it, and booted straight in to windows when it gave me the "windows didn't start normally" script.

So far it's stable.

 

I did not encounter this issue when performing a clean install on my MomentusXT.

I'm running a R2 and I did a complete reinstall, not a re-image.

 

That's quite odd. I swapped that same drive in on mine about two weeks ago and never had to load any drivers or anything.

 

Yeah, that's odd. The only thing you ought see like that would be the freefall protection module needing to recognize the new drive and needing a reboot in order to finalize that process. I did both an cloned image and later a fresh install onto my Momentus without any problems.

 

At this point I have to ask the obvious question.

Did you ever attempt to boot it up with the original drive it shipped with before you swapped the XT in?

 

Same as this post. Except with the R1. Just did it two hours ago in fact (seeing as amazon just delivered it)

 

Hi All, and thanks for all of your replies.

Ive been an IT pro for sometime and have installed all kinds of blank drives in all kinds of different systems and never got a message like that; and than it actually stopped the install: needless to say that it was very, very, odd.

What I might do is connect the drive via USB to another computer and format it and do a disk check to clean off any crap that might be on it and try to reinstall or just image the configuration I installed on the factory dive (No; it is not Dells crap-ware image) that is clean and stable and see if that works.

I was just curious if anyone else had ran into this before I do any more unnecessary work. I will post if I find anything interesting.

Thanks again,

 

Did you ever boot the M11x with the hard drive it shipped with or did you just swap the XT in right away?

 

@ Baker

I did; and than did clean install on the factory drive.

Both are fine.

Thanks,

 

Here is how it went:

Checked the Momentus on another computer via USB, ran tests, and everything was o.k. as far as the drive itself was concerned. I than partitioned it, set it to active primary, and used Driveimage xml to do a disk to disk, sector for sector image. Installed the Momentus in the M11x and used the Win7 boot/recovory disk to boot the image and it worked perfectly.

My feeling is that there is something wonky about the Win7 disk that Alienware supplies with the machine, it does not even have any repair/restore options that the commercial version has; hence the reason I made a repair disk from the original install. It also hiccuped a couple times before it gave me that weird error message before it stopped the install on the first attempt.

I guess you could just chalk it up to "good ole Microsoft"????

Some thing will never change.....



My .02

 

I installed my XT about 5 days ago. It works wonderfully on my system. All I did was a clean install. In BIOS i made sure it boot up from the CD/DVD external drive first before the HDD. And it was easy sailing from there. I am unsure what the issue is.

Just Incase: YouTube - M11x - R1 - How to Replace Your Hard Drive

Hope you get it working!
DeeVu

 

Camino this same thing just happened to me I had to use a different external DVD drive I suspect it may be your CD drive not reading the entire disk properly or like you said you have a bad install CD.