Replaced a hard drive - what steps do I need to take to get it working again?

Hello all,

I have a Dell Latitude C610 whose hard drive died a while ago. I am not the original buyer - I got it from a friend. I carefully removed the dead hard drive and connected it to another laptop and retrieved most of the files I needed from it.

Then recently I bought a hard drive on ebay that was for the same system. I replaced it into the hard drive tray, and replaced the tray into the laptop. The laptop now starts up, but it says something like "No boot drive" and allows me to press F1 for retry or F2 to enter the utility.

The hard drive should be more or less the same as the one that was faulty. Apart from getting a similar hard drive, what steps do I need to take to get this laptop working again?

 

You obviously have to install an operating system on there. Just plugging in an empty hard drive into a laptop will not work.

So get a copy of your favorite OS, instert the cd, boot off of it and then proceed with the installation.

 

Please do not double post.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=154278

I locked your other thread.

 

LOL seriously you forgot to install the OS? If you just thought of moving everything over from the old drive including the OS, that doesnt always work. It has worked for me once though but usually it doesnt.

 

That sounds like something a blonde would do.

 

Thanks for the response. (Also, sorry to the admin for the double post. I did not know which thread was better suited to this question. Thanks for closing the redundant thread.)

Right, to answer a few questions.

1. I have only put the hardware back together again. I am well aware that I need to reinstall the OS. I'm just quite impressed that I got all the hardware back in the right place.

2. Obviously I don't expect the computer to just up and work. (And yes, you are indeed right that a blonde might say that. I'm Asian, so don't go there .) I have the Windows 2k operating system CDROM with me. But I was wondering how to get the laptop to recognize the CDROM. Does it automagically "know" that there's a CD drive, if I've ripped out the hard disk? Or do I have to go through the startup commands and remind it that there's a CD drive?

3. As I understand, the OS disc only tells the hard drive how to run Windows. It won't, for example, contain drivers for the Dell touchpad and other peripherals, right? Would I have to assemble some sort of boot disc first, or do you think I can put the OS on the hard drive first and then download the rest of the peripherals from Dell's website?

Thanks for the speedy and courteous responses, by the way. I'm glad I came to this forum with this question.

 

No takers?

To clarify:

I have a W2k CD that presumably worked on the old computer.

I have a hard drive that I installed newly. How do I get the OS onto the hard drive? (I've gone into the setup utility and told it to look for the CD drive first, and then I rebooted it with the W2k CD in the CD drive. That didn't work.)

An additional note: Somebody mentioned it's possible the new hard drive is broken. While I acknowledge this could be an issue, it makes more sense for me to assume for the time being that it's okay, and instead to troubleshoot other issues.

And I didn't "forget" to install the OS. The truth is, I know I have to do it but I'm not sure how. Let's run with that as the main problem and see if there are any answers out there.

Bootup message is "No bootable devices - Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility", if that helps at all.

 

You guys are of limited helpfulness. Most of you basically stuck around for long enough to make a few sarcastic wise-ass comments, and then disappeared. We'll see if this improves or not.

I took the notebook to a Circuit City and they tried connecting the new hard drive to another computer. That turned up a bad clicking noise, which implied (as somebody here correctly suggested) that the new hard drive was faulty as well. Fortunately I got a refund on the hard drive.

One final question is this:

I have a Win2k CD. When I put it in the CD drive, the drive clearly spins it and it will open and close, so the drive is clearly getting power. However, the computer does not load from the CD even though I've gone to BIOS and bumped the CD drive all the way to the top of the boot order.

For a while I thought my CD drive might have been damaged as well. But then I found out that the hard drive might have been a confounding factor as well. Is the CD boot behavior normal? Would it normally refuse to boot from CD if it detects no hard drive?

 

Apologies for not trying to help earlier. I was offline when this originally came up.

First, you should be able to get all the drivers for C610 off the Dell website.

Second, I've never tried to boot a CD without a HDD in place. It's possible it won't run. You'll have to put an HDD in to troubleshoot that one. If you find that the ODD still won't read then maybe that is shot as well. They are standard components so replacement should not be too difficult (or you may prefer to get an external ODD provided the system will boot from a USB device).

John

 

the CD will boot without a hard drive BUT it is possible if its a dell modified disc then it supposedly tries to detect hardware before booting from the CD and stops when it doesnt detect a drive to install on.

the CD itself could be damaged?

or yeah could be the drive is faulty, powers up powers down cant read discs.

 

Hmm, I put the disc out of curiosity into my functional laptop, and the laptop detected it was a Win2k startup CD (not a Dell laptop recovery CD) and then said it was an old version, thus it would not install it.

I explored around the CD and all seemed fine. The functional laptop had no problems reading it, and it looked like it was genuinely a Windows CD for W2k.

At this point, would you suggest getting another hard drive and trying it out again? Is there any way to troubleshoot further without one?

Thanks for your help in advance.

 

A program like Nero ghost can help you make a 100% copy of your old HDD and then copy it to the new one... but depending how much data is on there it will be a pain to burn that many dvds.

 

There could be hardware compatibility problems with a very early W2K CD.

One way to get round this is to use nLite to slipstream in the W2K service packs (downloadable from Microsoft) to build a W2K SP4 CD. You can also slipstream in the drivers for the Dell notebook.

Another test is to use a Linux live CD (eg Ubuntu) and see if that boots OK.

John