Can#t get old hard drive to work in new laptop - please help.

Hi,

My dell m1330 with vista home premium (32 bit) blew up (yes, blew up - smoke from power supply transformer). Dell have sent me a replacement one which boots up fine, but I'm trying to get the old hard drive in my dead laptop to work in my new one (its better). When I boot up with it in, I get the BSOD which says:

a problem has been detected... tech info: STOP: 0x0000007B (0xC958ABB0, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

When I run the windows dvd to repair, it says it can't repair with th following error:

Root cause found:

Unspecified changes to system configuration might have caused the problem.

Repair action: System files integrity check and repair
Result: Failed. Error code = 0x490
Time taken= 275935ms

All checks before this error pass. Safe mode brings the same error. When I run dell diagnostics, I get this error:

error code 0147
msg: error code 2000-0147
msg: unit 0: optical drive BIST - OPU test failed

while all other checks pass (I guess this is an unrelated dvd drive issue).

I've tried a few things - chkdsk on my c partition - no errors, fixmbr etc.

Does anyone have any suggetions other than reformatting? Although the replacement laptop was identical in tech spec to my old one, could there have been any differences in the setup that's causing it? Anything I can try tweaking in BIOS? I tried contacting Dell for help, they just said reformat.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated, thanks

Sachin

 

See if you can boot to a live linux cd.

 

Thanks for the reply - I've managed to figure it out though. I had to set ACHI to ATA in the BIOS. Phew!

 

O yea, that was my second guess, lol. Actually now that you say that, i remember something about that when I was poking around mine. Ill keep it in mind if it ever happens to me.