Dell not recognizing new hard drive

Hi,
I finally put in the new hard drive (Samsung(recommended by some on this site) and when I try to boot off a CD it says error and no hard disk drive. In BIOS it states no Primary hard drive, and on diagnostics it states no hard drive.
This is the first time I am doing this and am away from home for a while so don't have the original system disks that came with the Latitude. However I have a boot disk, WinXP, and Acronis on disk...any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
mgomez

 

Is the harddrive IDE, im not sure about laptop hdds that are IDE but on a desktop you have to set them to be the Primary harddrive for them to work using a jumper

 

I think you need to format the drive on a desktop or through an external enclosure in order for the drive to be accessed by your laptop.

If you are installing XP on a SATA harddrive this will happen. WIndows XP does not have integrated sata drivers on the installation disc. You will have to use a external floppy drive with the right SATA driver in order for your harddrive to be recognized. To do this, you need to preff F6 when the xp installation screen appears. Press F6 when the little part on the bottom of the screen says "press f6 to load sata drivers" than after that happens, later on in the process you will be asked to use the files from the floppy disc. Press s and than enter, and you should be all set.

If you are installing windows vista, you should not have any problems, since it has a serial ata driver built in.

Does the main bios of the system see the harddrive?
You have to press F2, or delete to enter the Bios.

It would also be helpful if you could tell us the laptop model and the harddrive model

K-TRON

 

Hi,
thanks for responding...it is a Dell Latitutude 600 and the hard drive is the Samsung that K-tron had recommended months back (showing the data on comparison). This is all new for me so I will recap what I understand...
I have a winxp professional CD; the computer does bring up the bios screen and here it states no hard drive. I have a boot disk and Acronis; so this is basicly what I'm working with...any more details would be really helpful.
thanks
mgomez

 

Regarding formatting on the desk top..is there where I need a 'jumper' and what is this?
mgomez

 

If you look at the top of the samsung drive, you will see a small diagram which tells you how to set the jumper. You should have the drive set on Master, meaning that no pin-jumper is installed
If you have a desktop with a free sata port, you can plug the HM160HC into a sata cable, and a sata power cable and you will be able to format the drive from XP/Vista in the "my computer" folder
Also when you have the drive connected to a working computer, go to disc management.
To get to disc management in xp, go to the control panel, than go to "administrative tools" than "computer management" than go to "storage" than click on disc management
If the samsung drive is recognized than that is a good sign.
If your latitude is a D600 than it should have no problem recognizing the 160gb drive.
If you have the latitude C600 you may have problems. The C600 is a pentium 3 aged system so it can probably only recognize a drive less than 50gb.

What I recommend you do, is go to dells website and download the latest bios revision. Install the latest bios image from a cd and that should allow the bios to see the harddrive.
If you have the D600 all 160gb will be seen
if you have the C600 you may have to partition it into four 40gb partitions, for the drive to be recognised by the system.
If you have the C600, it will probably give you a ton of headaches installing such a big drive, so I recommend returning it and getting a cheap 40gb drive.

K-TRON

 

Thanks K-tron..I am figuring out if the computers here have a SATA port and then will find a cable..it is a D600 so hopefully it will be recognized. I have downloaded the BIOS from Dell and assume that I just plop this into the drive of the now defunct dell and it will actually read it and load it? boy, I am learning much more than I intended but it's all good. thanks again and will update as I figure out the ports/cable...
mgomez

 

I am 100% sure that the D600 uses IDE based laptop harddrives.
When you removed the plastic harddrive cartridge from the side of your laptop, did you make sure that the drive is facing the proper direction?
Make sure that the drive is actually fitting into the IDE port on the laptop.
Usually it can only fit one or two ways, so look into the laptop and look at the IDE port. In the middle of the port, one of the holes is filled in. This is the key for IDE, so that the drive can only be installed the right way. Lineup the harddrive with that key and the drive will install properly.
The best way to know if the drive is sata or IDE is this. IDE drives have 39 pins sticking out of the one end of the drive. Sata has like 7 flat pins usually in a very thin connector.

K-TRON

 

K-TRON are you sure it is because XP doesnt have SATA-drivers? As i can see, the HDD won't even show up in BIOS, and then there's no operating system in the world that will end up showing the HDD if not even BIOS can see the HDD.

It seems like it should be a setting for the HDD to be a primary HDD. I think i've seen people having this kind of trouble when installing a new IDE/PATA HDD that won't be shown at all because of the primary/slave problem.

 

I am purchasing a SATA cable for the formatting on a PC...where abouts would I find the SATA port on the PC..is this external? and I'm assuming I connect the SATA cable directly to the hard disk and then to the PC to do the formatting. I will open back up the laptop and check about the number of prongs. I tried putting the new download BIOs (from Dell) into the DVD/CD drive to upload but nothing is happening..continue to school me...
mgomez

 

Umm, if it is the HM160HC, it's not SATA... I don't even know why K-TRON stated it as SATA earlier and mentioned about a SATA-cable then.

It's a PATA/IDE harddrive, so have you tried the jumper-settings as first mentioned!? You have to set the drive to be master, else it won't work or not even show up no mather what you do.

you can see the HDD to the right on this pic and on the label it has a pin-layout mentioning about "Master" "slave" and "cable sel" - to the right of the text "SAMSUNG" - you got a jumper to remove on the HDD to make it master. it's ontop of the HDD if you look at the pic, where all the pins are, there should be 6 separate pins with something covering two of those.


As i can see you haven't even made this change ? You have to, in order to get it work.

You will not be able to connect that HDD to a desktop computer with a sata-cable as it's not a hdd of such kind.

 

At the beginning I did not know if his drive was SATA, or IDE, so I mentioned ways to get around this for both interfaces.

You need to use a adaptor like this to plug your harddrive into another computer.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186036

K-TRON

 

Hehe, i know that you know HM160HC is not a SATA hdd (as you review it), so i know you must have been tired or something when you wrote that

Anyway, problem is likely to be solved just setting the HDD as a master, because t he drive was not even detected in the BIOS. So there is no point in getting something to connect the HDD to a PC or even recommend him doing it. It's clearly what the problem is here