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    New Hard Drive installation/formatting - need help

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by jonnybardo, May 21, 2012.

  1. jonnybardo

    jonnybardo Notebook Consultant

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    Hi all,
    Shortly after receiving a Samsung Series 5 laptop as a gift the hard drive started clicking and then I received the message that it was failing so I should back it up. I did so on a hard drive from an old retired laptop and ordered a new hard drive from Newegg - a Western Digital, 7mm in height due to the ultrabook size - same size (500 mb) and general specifications.

    Anyhow, I pulled out the old hard drive and put in the new one and then booted up the computer. It got to the Samsung screen appeared for just a second or two while the load bar went from half to full and then the screen went dark, and it did the same thing - over and over again. I held the power to turn it off. I then attached an external CD drive (it is a 13" without an internal drive) and put in the System Recovery disc that came with the computer. I tried booting again and the same thing happened. On that screen were two options - F2 for Setup, F4 for Recovery. Pressing F4 did nothing, but I was able to get into Setup. I changed the Boot order to USB CD first and tried again. Still nothing.

    Am I doing something wrong? I was under the impression that formatting a new hard drive was quite easy in this day in age, that you just had to put it in and turn on the computer and you would receive directions from there. I'm under the impression that either (hopefully) I'm missing something or I received a faulty hard drive from Newegg. Just to make sure I didn't mess something up while swapping the hard drives (e.g. damage the SATA wire, which is quite frail), I put the old failing one back in and it loaded just fine - I needed to do a Recovering, but it is still working. It starts clicking after a few minutes of use and asks me to backup my files.

    So what to do? Am I missing something? Are there any good guides on this site or elsewhere that might help me? Is the new hard drive crap?

    Thanks in advance.
     
    jonnybardo, May 21, 2012
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  2. jonnybardo

    jonnybardo Notebook Consultant

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    Whoops, sorry about the duplicate threads - please delete the other ones (which are actually blank?). Anyhow, I tried posting a few times and it wasn't working, but I guess it was just delayed in showing up. Weird.
     
    jonnybardo, May 21, 2012
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