I bought an Alienware m9750 a couple months ago and got an 80 gig hard drive with it then bought myself a 300 gig hard drive seperately. I installed it fine and had windows vista running on it perfectly for a month and a bit then I started getting some issues. My computer would lock up every so often requiring a hard boot. I didn't have much on the computer yet so I decided to just to try and reinstall windows.
I wasn't impressed with vista so I decided to try and install my retail copy of windows XP professional on it. Well i got through the first portion of the install no problems, but then right after post it tells me "Error loading operating system" and that's it. So I decided to try again and got the same error so I said screw it, i'll try Vista again, but then the vista installer no longer recognized my 300 gig hard drive.
I have vista installed on the smaller 80 gig hard drive and when I boot to it I can access the 300 gig drive no problem, I formatted it and still nothing. So I decided to try and see if the installer could recognize my other drive and it did no problems. The 300 gig drive is recognized in the BIOS as well. It seems like the only thing that doesn't recognize it is the windows vista installer. Strangely enough, if I try and install windows XP on it again with my retail CD, even the XP installer recognizes it. I'm using the vista installer on my Alienware system recovery DVD and i've used it to install vista on the exact same drive in the past with no problems. Anyone have any ideas?
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What I would suggest is to run DBAN with the quick erase option to write zeros to the 300 GB drive. I had a similar issue before and this seemed to clear it up. If that doesn't work I would think your hard drive is bad because you said that XP never truly worked on it either.
If you try DBAN you will need the 2.0.0 version to work on Core 2 Duo. -
yeah try dban or you could try the full format instead of quick format option in the xp install which would check for errors on your hd
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Thanks for the help, but I cant for the life of me get DBAN to work. No matter what I do I just can't get it to boot. Are there any alternatives out there that I can run from within windows? Because I can boot to windows on my other drive and access the problem drive. Thanks.
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When you installed the operating system onto your harddrive did you use the proper sata drivers. When installing XP, on a new sata harddrive, you will have to press F6. Then you will have to plug in the floppy drive with the correct sata drivers for your motherboard. Than the computer will access the sata driver, and installation will continue.
Note: Vista has most sata drivers, so you may not need to do this.
If you still cannot get the harddrive to work properly, you may have received a bad drive.
I would contact the place where you received the drive and ask for a replacement.
K-TRON -
I installed vista on it when I first got it without having to install any SATA drivers. I think it's probably a bad drive, but what I find strange is that the windows XP installation can view the drive, but the windows vista installation can't. Keep in mind that I have in fact used the exact same vista install media to properly install vista on the drive just 2 months ago. I think i'll take the drive back tomorrow and see what they say.
HDD issues
Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by gooms9, May 25, 2008.