HD Hitachi problem with HP Pavillion ZE4200

Hello all,

i hope someone has experience on this as i am really frustrated. I bought yesterday a Hitachi IC25N080ATMR04-0 80Gb disk and i cant seem to get it to format when i first installed it. My notebook is a HP Pavillion ZE4200 purchased with a 30Gb Toshiba disk (MK3021GAS). Now that i installed the 80gb hitachi disk, the format from windows stops at 99% and reports that windows cannot be installed on this disk as it might be damaged. This got me worried as it has happened in the past where i ended buying 2 x Toshiba 40Gb disks which had the exact same problem. (i use them now perfectly on my desktop and not on the laptop).
I tested the new hitachi drive now with the fitness test and it reports no error on the quick test. On the advance full test it reports an error code 0x41 - Bad Cable, and that i should replace the ATA cable and run the test again. That got me confused as which ATA cable can i change? its a laptop and i dont see any ATA or non cables in it. Only the screen cables and the mouse/keyboard cable exists in there, all other is motherboard?????
Has anyone any recommendation on this, as it can't be that 3 drives have problem and there is no ata cable there (except if its meant that the board is dying, which has returned no errors on all other major tests i have made to it with other little tools. The old 30Gb disk works fine, the 40 gb disks had problems even loading windows when on the laptop (when i managed to format them on the desktop and then install them on laptop). and finally the 80 gb disk has the exact same problem. Is there any firmware/bios/motherb/or anything else that i could upgrade/fix?

I am sorry if i have confused a lot or wrote to much, but am really dissapointed by hp as even they verified to me by multi emails that the disks are compatible and everything.

Thanks for listening and hope that someone helps me out and all others with tech problems

Byes for now

 

The only thing I can think of that could be the cause is the systems BIOS might be too old. On some older computers (noteboko & desktops), they used to have a 32GB HDD limit. This might be the problem here. You said that your 30GB works fine, but 40GB & and 80GB won't work at all.

Some things you can try:

1. Partition the HDD to sizes 30GB & under. Try installing the OS and see how it works. It might work this way. If not, try #2.

2. Try formatting the 80GB HDD from your desktop using NTFS or Fat32. Put the drive back into your notebook and then install XP. When given the option, select install on exiting parition w/o formatting the drive (leave current file system intact). Make sure it's a clean install & not using a Restore CD which restores via an image. If this works, then you're set, if not, try the next step.

3. Use an overlay program like Ontrack's Disk Manager. It'll fool your system to allow you to use the larger capacity HDD in your system. Install your OS and see.

Other than those options, I think you're out of luck if it doesn't work other than sending your notebook in for repair (probably out of warranty).

Good Luck!

-Vb-

 

Hi,

thanks for the quick reply. It seems that the format completed now and i am installing windows on it with no problem i hope. I had the current BIOS update (1.59) when i purchased the 40Gb disks and they didnt work as i was then (2 months ago) instructed by HP to update the BIOS. I checked for a newer BIOS update on their site and found that 1.60 is the newest one and a note that it fixes the problem with other hard disks being rejected. Now (hopefully) i will be a happy 80gb user
Thanks for the help as buying 70GBP disks worth is not my favorite task , especially when i end up using them on my desktop.

Byes

 

Good to see that the problem was just getting a BIOS update. I wish all resolutions were this straight forward.

-Vb-

 

Hi there, am back as it means that i was happy for no reason.
It turns out that the same problem appeared when i switched off the laptop for a few hours and rebooted later. It recognizes the 80gb disk as a 70.13gb. That atleast shows within bios. In some occasions it doesnt show any disk. I was happy and felt like a proud owner of a laptop, now i wanna sell it. Dunno what else to do.
Any ideas? I have contacted hp but no reply yet and the laptop only works 100% with its original 30gb disk, not with the 40 and 80gb. The bios update was from v1.5x to v1.60 which should fix some problems with other hard disks. HA. i dont belive them. tried it, and failed the cut.
Help please really desperate here. (btw, i dont know if i mentioned, but had tried in the past to upgrade memory from 256 to 512 and i got the blue screens of terror - note that memories where brand new sealed and tried twice.)
Anyways thats it. Hope someone can help out a bit, as i dont want to sell the laptop (although i do) but to much trouble..

ANyways again.
gonna do something
byezz



-----------edit----------addon----------
i found this error message under the event viewer --->system
(The driver detected that the device DeviceHarddisk0DR0 has its write cache enabled. Data corruption may occur.)
Why can cache writing cause corruption? i mean the disk has a cache and to my knowledge and the hitachis tests, it works fine. is there a driver or something that is not working wright?
anyways, more info on this story later.
help please

 

I'm sorry to hear it didn't work as planned. With this happening again, and you mentioning the issue with the ram, it's possible there's a problem with your systemboard. I've seen systemboards that are starting to flake do things like this. You may want to send the unit in for service and have them replace the systemboard. The only other issues that could causes problems, like the ones you mentioned, are bad ram (incorrect speed, type, etc...) or a bad HDD (defective, incompatible in the system). If HP said the 80GB should work fine, then it's a problem with the system itself. So sending it in may be the only fix.

Regarding the cache issue. There's 2 different types of caching, Write-Through & Write-Back. Write-Back caching is when the system sends a write command to the HDD, but the HDD doesn't write it immediately to the disk. It stores the command in its cache and writes it later. It reports back to the system that the write was complete, even though it wasn't, so the system can start sending other write requests to the drive. This makes things faster because the system doesn't have to wait for an actual write to the drive before it sends the next request. The only problem with this is the fast that it's stored in the HDD's cache. As with all volatile memory, it'll lose the info when power is cut. That's what the error message is reporting. It's not indicating you have a problem, just a note.

-Vb-

 

Hello again and thank you for replying to my post.
I am posting this as i wanted to point out that i cant seem to find any logic (although thats the only probably explanation to this) that the board may be starting to fail. This is mainly to the fact that the laptop has passed every single test i put it through with (microscope diagnostic tests on board,hd,ram,cpu,gpu,controllers....). It works 100% with its original disk 30gb toshiba, but fails sometimes with the 80gb and 40gb disks. The disks are not corrupted in any way as they have been tested aswell and passed everything. One other thing that came to mind was that maybe it could be the small adapter that connects to the disk and then to the mboard (if that could be of different specs or something), although it makes perfect contact with both parts.

Anyways. Thank you for your time and hope to hear from you soon.

 

Mke,

Well, diagnostics aren't guaranteed to report back a problem. Issues that are itermittent may not show up unless a specific scenario is occuring. I've troubleshooted a lot of computers and I've found that diagnostics programs are not 100%. I've seen cases where a diag program will report that there was a problem with memory, but even after replacing the memory the errors were still there. It turned out to be a systemboard problem (memory slot), not the memory, that was the cause.

Now for your specific issue, I guess I can't say with 100% certainty that it's the systemboard, but what else can it be? You've tried an updated BIOS, 2 40GB HDD and 1 80GB HDD, which all returned with zero results. Your diagnostics programs says everything is good. You've tested the HDD's in your desktop and have found that they're good. Since the drives themselves are working in your desktop and not in your notebook, you've kinda narrowed down the problem to your notebook. Since it's in your notebook, it's either hardware or software. When booting your system, the only software being used is the BIOS (to detect the HDD) so anything regarding the OS is out. So the problem is somewhere between the HDD connector on the systemboard to the BIOS on the systemboard. Well, this generally leave just the systemboard or something connected to the systemboard, since everything is integrated on/connected to it.

You also mentioned that you've tried different ram in the system, twice, without any luck (blue screens of death). Well, this just makes things lean more towards the systemboard.

If the updated BIOS you've tried doesn't work, the only other option is to try replacing the systemboard. Troubleshooting any problem is generally a process of elimination. Since this unit is a couple/few years old, it's most likely out of warranty. That means that you'd have to take a chance that a new systemboard will fix the problem. I'ts also possible that your unit is incapable of using anything higher than 30GB. In that case, you're systems fine.

Other than that, I don't know what else to suggest.

Good Luck!

-Vb-