M7700 Hard Drive Not Detected

My brother in-law picked up a used m7700 for a few hundred and it suddenly died on him. Suspecting him of the normal "too much , I need to do a fresh install" has left me with no HDD's being detected. I have tried slipstreaming, I DO have a USB floppy and have tried every drive I can find known to man but it just will not even detect that I have any HDD's attached.

It is currently in a Raid array with w 60GB HDD's. I just want the thing working at ths point...1 hard drive or 2!

Thanks in advance!

Nikolas

 

anyone? lol

 

the m7700 is a rebranded Clevo D900k. our resident experts for that particular system are Gophn and K-tron. maybe you could shoot them a PM.

 

Sorry for the late reply, I was away from nbr for a while

What kind of harddrive cable do you have?
The PATA kind or the SATA kind?

If you have the PATA kind you should not be having problems. If you are, you need to enter the RAID manager after the BIOS loads. Simply press TAB during the boot process. Delete the array and recreate it as a RAID 0, RAID 1 or spanning array.

If you have a SATA drive cable, you may have a fun experience.
For one the system needs SATA drivers loaded on a bootable floppy drive if you are installing any Windows XP version, or early Vista SP1 era discs.
You need certain files loaded onto that floppy. I do not know the names off the top of my head, but if necessary I can send the files to you via rapidshare.
All you need to have is the USB floppy drive installed and the Windows disc in the optical drive.
Simply press F6 to load the files from the floppy drive and when windows prompts you to, press "S" and Enter to load the SATA drivers. Windows will then see your harddrive and allow you to format and install Windows.

It was a hard process and confused me when I first got my D900K


There is another possibility,
On the D900K, version 4.X and 5.1 only support SATA 150 drives. Only version 5.2 supports SATA 300 drives.
If this is the case, you need to change the firmware on your SATA drives to SATA 150 mode.
You should follow this guide in order to do it:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=347779

This is only necessary if your harddrives are not being picked up by the BIOS.

Please note you can only change firmware settings from a system which supports SATA 150 and SATA 300 drives. I used my Dell E1505 for changing my firmware settings on my two Hitachi 7K320 drives used in my D900K

I hope this helps,

K-TRON

 

he said he has them in Raid correct.?

and he is trying to boot with a different HD then what was originally in RAID (or one went bad).....

he needs to turn raid off to install windows. ( i could be mistaken.. I didn't quite get the jest of the problem ....)

Go into BIOS then turn off raid and put in a Drive you know works and try to install windows

 

Thanks all. Yes, the system was in Raid. The same two HDD's are still hooked up when trying to boot. I have tryed using just one and then just the other with no luck at either being recognized(that almost sounds like a ribbon cable issue). I will try a HDD that I know works. I have pressed tab to attempt to get into the raid manager I deleted the array but then it would not let me create one as it said there were no HDD's detected...grrrrrr

 

With either HDD installed I get

No Device is found. No Bios is Installed.

This is with Raid turned off in the bios.

 

Now getting a Stop 0x0000007B error message! Grrr

 

This could mean one of two things:
1) the drive is a SATA 300 drive and the firmware needs to be changed to SATA 150 speed

or

2) the physical ribbon cable is damaged and needs to be replaced.
(Make sure the cable is properly connected into the motherboard)


You may want to try resetting the BIOS to factory defaults in order to clear up any problems which may come up

K-TRON

 

It has the .06 Bios on it now, you mean just hit the "Factory Defaults" or whatever button after getting into the BIOS from F2'ing or actually do a flash. I'm a computer junkie and have been building, OC'ing, etc for nearly 20 years,,,,I feel like such a noob right now..lol. Amiga's were so much easier.

 

ALso, I read somewhere about the ribbon cable having a dot...this one does. These are the original HDD's from 4 or so years ago.

 

I have never heard of this dot thing. I will check and see if mine has one.

Yes, set the BIOS back to factory settings.
Do not flash the BIOS, it is a dangerous and risky process.


When you power the system on do the harddrives spin up at all?

K-TRON

 

Supposedly there are 2 types of ribbon cables, a small black dot on the underside denotes that you have a newer one. IDK...Just what I was told

 

BIOS set to factory, didnt help....grrrrrrr

 

After the post, if you don't see the promise technolgy RAID/SATA screen pop up.
The Motherboard (Promise Technolgy chipset) had failed.Even if you change the ribbon cables won't be help at all.