Changing hard drive issues in NC6220

I've got an HP Compaq NC6220 in the repair shop I work in right now. It came in for problems booting into windows. All the hardware tested out fine, and I eventually was able to boot into windows after manually deleting a corrupted hyberfil. Once in Windows, I saw that the drive only had 30mb of free space, which could have caused the initial problems. I got customer approval to upgrade the hard drive to a larger one and cloned their original hard drive to a 160GB hard drive, but the system will not boot with the 160GB drive. It gets past the HP splash screen and then the cursor just blinks like there is nothing on the drive. I thought it might be a hardware limitation, so I tried another 40GB drive just for testing - same issue. The system will still boot fine with the customer's original drive. I've gone into the BIOS and reset to defaults, I've updated to the latest version, and I've tried messing with the security settings. None of these worked.

Possible issues that I have no yet tested:
When I ghosted the customer's drive to our drive, I did not have a jumper on the drive (it was set as master) while the customer's drive is set to cable select. I have tried putting a jumper on our drive since then to set it to CS, and it does not work. I really REALLY doubt this has ANYTHING to do with it though, as if I remove the jumper from the customer's drive, I still boot into windows without an issue.

When it came in I thought maybe it had a problem with the drive controller, but I really doubt that considering her drive consistently boots and our drives do not.

I've researched it a bit and I can't find others with this issue. I thought it might be somehow related to the "drivelock" feature, but it doesn't appear that way - it's disabled in the BIOS.

Her drive: 40GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2
Our drives: 160GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3, 40GB Toshiba MK4025GAS

All suggestions appreciated,
Hep!

 

That sounds odd to me. I have swapped hard drives with different laptops and sometimes a good hard drive won't work in a certain laptop for no reason.

BTW I have an NC6220 with a 7200 RPM 60GB HDD.

 

The fact that not even other 40GB drives work eliminated the thought that it's a hardware limitation. Thanks for the post... any other ideas?

 

I don't know the method you used to clone the new hard drive from your posts, but did you try installing the uncloned new hard drive in the notebook and then clone it from the original hard drive or external drive with an image of it from a USB source. I would give that a try. Sounds like the MBR is somehow not being recongized.

 

I cloned the drive outside the system. What is weird is if I do a force clone and a clone all (using norton ghost on a bootable CD) I can boot from my drive a SINGLE TIME. After that, it doesn't boot anymore. I tried a fixboot and fixmbr to no avail.

I am now booted into GParted and it is showing some errors on the FS. Going to try to fix them. This makes no ****ing sense....

I am going to try to chkdsk the client disk first, maybe that's all it was all along!

 

Looks to me like HP might have used HP hardware signed drives or something. So weird.