Lifebook N series - Fujitsu - and hard drives

I have an N series Fujitsu laptop with a hard drive that is failing.

Ordered an IDENTICAL laptop hdd from Toshiba, but it will not recognize the drive. It will only recognize the original drive that is failing.

BIOS has no options, tried all jumper settings, even though not necessary on these drives.

The new drive is easily seen in external drive bays, so it is a known good.

Has anybody ever had this issue?

 

Which laptop and drive do you have?

 

Fujitsu N-3010, Toshiba MK6021GAS drives.

The issue started when we inadvertantly got a MK6025GAS, and the laptop wouldn't recognize it, even in the BIOS. So we thought perhaps it was ePATA.

Ordered MK6021GAS, identical to first, but still will not see it in the BIOS. But it always sees the original HDD just fine.

I can even email pictures of the drives' labels to compare.

 

I would swear this is a size issue, because it is seeing older, smaller hdd's in the laptop, EXCEPT for the fact that we used Acronis on the new/identical one, so partitions and volumes are the same size!!

 

The size of the partition shouldn't matter for Acronis. I have installed images on varying partition sizes. Perhaps it's an issue with Acronis. Maybe you could try a XP disc if you have one or a Linux live CD to see if it can detect the drive.

 

No, Acronis is not the problem. It imaged fine. It is detected via external drives elsewhere and is browseable. The BIOS of the laptop will not even detect the HDD. Nothing else matters.

But on an even more bizarre side note, I tried a bunch of smaller drives, and every last one was seen by this laptop. So it does feel like a size issue, but just doesn't make sense since the originally attempted replacement is the exact drive model/size. So baffled.

 

I don't see how this could be a size issue since it's the same drive.