Inspiron 1420 new HDD install issue

I just installed a new 500gb HDD in my wife's laptop and now it is in an endless loop and rebooting while stating it did not start properly or something. Is there something simple I didn't do when installing this? I recall something about changing a setting in the bios for new drives on my Toshiba, but...I'm just rambling.

If anyone knows how to help me I would appreciate it!

Thanks,
Sam

 

Did you reinstall the operating system...?

If you did, did you change the SATA operation? That would cause an endless loop (you install in IDE mode and you change to AHCI or vice versa).

 

I got it running, but I installed in AHCI mode (which it was already set to) and then changed it to IDE mode and it seems to work. Now do I set it to AHCI mode again? I don't want to lose any performance on this drive (7200 RPM)

BTW, Thank you!

 

You shouldn't touch SATA operation once you install it. Why did you change it back? By going to IDE mode you lose NCQ, hot swap capabilities.

Performance is not going to be lost by going from IDE to AHCI mode in terms of read/write.

 

Before installing it, it was already set to AHCI mode. I then had the problems with the endless loop and switched it to IDE which seemed to solve the problem. I have no idea if it was installed in the correct way or it should have been done the opposite way. I guess I'm not too worried about hot swapping the hard drive, since that will never happen.

 

Did you try reinstalling the operating system when it started looping?

Also if you don't want to do that, hook up the hard drive externally to another computer and run chkdsk /r on the drive. Could be a bad file system.

 

Ok, maybe I need to back up here a second to better explain myself.

To start, the computer is up and running fine now (crossing my fingers)

My wife's hard drive crashed and when I tested it, it had bad sector after bad sector (I think the head crashed or something) so I purchased a new Samsung 500 GB 7200 RPM drive and 4 GB Ram since the memory was coming up with errors too.

I began installing and before windows could start for the first time, it started looping. That's when I came on here to help with the problem. I decided to play with the BIOS and found that setting you mentioned and switched it. It is now running and I'm currently performing all the massive updates needed for Vista.

Now on to new issues...

Now suddenly Vista would no longer load telling me winrun.exe or winstart.exe (I don't remember now) was missing or corrupt. I tried booting with the CD and got checksum errors. I swapped the ram with my computer and was able to boot via CD.

I then was unable to repair or go back to a know good backup. Not sure what was happening, but I rebooted and all of a sudden I'm in Windows.

Somewhere in there I switched everything in the BIOS to it's default settings and it was giving me a problem every time I would reboot. I was unable to load every single time! If I shut down and powered back on, it was fine. I have no idea what that was about, but I switched it back to IDE in the BIOS and once again I am able to load windows when I reboot (or restart, whichever you like).

I'm attempting to do some more updates to see what happens. I'll keep you posted.

Lastly, I should mention that I installed Vista with the drive in AHCI mode and then when I was having problems, changed it to IDE.

Should I have installed while in IDE and then changed it back to AHCI? I'm willing to do a complete reinstall at this point because I don't know how all these problems have affected my current install.

I really do appreciate all your help you are providing!

Thank you!!!

 

Well some laptops AHCI mode is flaky, my E6410 changing from IDE or RAID to AHCI even with a fresh install of Windows would yield random BSOD.

If you are having issues with AHCI, then just use IDE. A normal users won't really notice the difference anyway. I would really just reinstall in IDE mode as it hasn't caused any issues yet. You could also do the registry hack to change IDE to AHCI without reboot/BSOD issues.