Requesting some help following hard drive replacement

Hello, all. I'm experiencing some serious frustration with an m7700.

This unit was brought to me by an associate to have the hard drive replaced. It's firmly out of warranty. I tossed in a new(ish) 100GB hard drive, booted off my Windows CD, and discovered that the drive was not visible to Windows Setup. I've verified the drive is in fact good; it works just fine in my external enclosure.

A quick jaunt to the Alienware support site later, I'm armed with all the available drivers for this unit. I've extracted both hard drive controller drivers to floppy, purchased a USB floppy drive, and tried again. Windows Setup loads the drivers normally, but still doesn't see the hard drive. I try again with the other driver, same result. I change the drive's position on the hard drive cable and try twice more, once with each driver floppy. Same result: Windows Setup doesn't see the hard drive. (It sees the card reader bays and a flash drive just fine.)

By now I'm thinking that perhaps the hard drive controller has for some reason been disabled in the unit's BIOS. Reboot, hit F2, get the "please wait..." indicator that we're preparing to enter the BIOS, but when the little blue progress indicator hits the right edge, the unit proceeds with the boot process.

So my questions, then, are these:

1. How does one actually enter the BIOS on an Area51 m7700?
2. What else can I try to get Windows Setup to see the hard drive?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

First off what type of HDD is it? Sata or 40 pin?

 

Sorry, it's a 40-pin PATA.

 

could you try another drive?

 

ok well windows should still see it. I know that when loading xp on SATA drives you have to have the drivers on your install disc. Now this is what I would try since you can't get into the bios (even though f2 is the way to get in). Download gparted livecd burn the iso to a disk. Now hopefully you can boot from cd. Boot to that cd it will ask you 2 questions hit enter on the first one and then hit 33 on the second. Now wait a few sec and it will load a little screen that will hopefully show you, your drive and your partitions on that drive. Now if it does see it then I would say there is something wrong with your OS disc. Now if it doesn't the only thing I can think of from there is to replace your CMOS battery and if that STILL doesn't work let me know.

 

I have tried another drive, 60GB. Same result.

OS CD is fine. I used it to boot another system to the Windows Recovery Console earlier today, and reinstalled Windows on another PC with it over the weekend.

I'll try the gparted livecd and let you know.

 

yeah let me know that will let me know if your pc can actually see the drive and then we can go from there.

Edit: also try getting into the bios with the HD out. Your PC won't boot but it will still allow you to get into the bios. (just trying to narrow the problem down.)