Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Hi... My Quanta KN1 GM notebook was going to be 1 year old next week, so I decided to give a nice present by upgrading the hard drive... My old drive was a cute Fujitsu MHT2040AH (40 GB) and its motor stopped abruptly sometimes and had a hard time restarting. Well, I was waiting for a reason to upgrade (apart from the birthday present of course) so when this started to happen, I ordered a Toshiba MK1032GAX (100 GB).
Today, it arrived. I backed up my ext3 partitions with partimage, and burned backup dvds. I plugged in the new drive, placed my bootable system rescue cd to the tray and started the laptop. The pre-boot sequence was desperately slow. Then I noticed that the hard drive was quickly recognized, but my faithful dvd-r (QSI SDW082) couldn't make its voice heard. After two minutes, it started to boot, but as the dvdrom wasn't recognized, I saw an annoying "not a bootable disk" message on the screen.
Thinking that I may have effected the connections of the dvdrom, I unplugged it, replugged it: same... Maybe I screwed the dvdrom when I was connecting the hdd? Nope, with the old hard drive, there are no problems... And I constantly reminded myself that all my backups were on dvds... Ok then... No panic. It's probably time for a firmware upgrade... After some searches, I upgraded the firmware of the QSI dvdrom from LX41 to LX 55 ( http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~cfao/firmware/LX51_nochk.zip). No changes. Ok then... Try a bios upgrade why not? Of course, KN1 users know that Quanta doesn't like to be involved with their customers, but thanks to sabio digital, I upgraded the bios from Q3A29 to Q3B81 ( ftp://ftp.sabioproducts.com/pub/drivers/KN1/KN1_Bios/). Of course, to do these upgrades, I had to sacrifice my old drive and installed (probably) the first version of winxp found in the bottom of a dark box (after long searches). And also don't forget that I'm using the old hdd to download/install firmwares, then unplug it, plug the new one, see it doesn't work etc. Pretty boring... I tried older versions of the bios just to try my luck, needless to say, to no avail.
I tried every jumper combination with the hdd, couldn't find jumper settings for dvdrom etc... Finally I went to a friend's house to try which part was wrong... We uninstalled his hdd and cdrom, installed my combination, and it worked. So, there are probably no problems with the ide duo. On the other hand, the bios upgrade Q3B81 was dated April 2006, so there are little hopes for waiting for a miracle to happen... Thanks to the aforementioned friend, I grabbed his external dvdr (Memorex DVD16+/-DL4RWlD2) and restored my backups to my new hdd.
I think the main problem is that the bios is still not at home with the Toshiba MK1032GAX drive. But I'm not sure... I found a setup in a computer store where they have the toshiba harddrive in a KN1, but with a different dvdr.The guys at sabio have a nice chart on their website listing the tested hard drives with KN1 laptops. Check that before you buy anything.
As for me, now I uninstalled the QSI dvdrom, and I sticked a tape to the hole. I have a 100gb harddrive, and I wish so hard that my friend doesn't want his dvdrom back. QSI was actually a crappy dvdr, the maximum speed I could get was 2x, but even then, I knew that upgrading the firmware would make changes, though I was too ashamed of having to install windows just to do a fw update. Hell, now I've got the lastest firmware, and I can't use it. I seriously started to think of buying a new dvdr next month, however there are two issues: 1. what if the guys at quanta decide to include a support in their new bios that week?, 2. who can guarantee that the new dvdr will work coherently with the hard drive...
Questions, questionss.... I really need some serious (preferably professional) help. It's been about 10 hours since the hdd arived, and I still couldn't find a solution... Shame... Well, writing this post was kind of fun... at least... It's long though... Ok, seriously, it looks like I'm telling a story, but really, I need some advice. Wish I didn't write it that long... Probably you first read a couple of sentences in the beginning, and skipped to the end to see the point? Did you? Ok here's the point .
Quanta KN1, incompatible hardware??? need advice.
Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by sui, May 31, 2006.
