dv9035nr not detecting hard drive

I have this HP Pavilion 9000 series laptop with model # dv9035nr. All I want is to install Win 7 on it but when I insert the HDD it doesn't detect it. The Hard disk Test tool says No IDE Device. The BIOS version is F.27. The Hard Drive that I am trying to install is Fujitsu 80 GB with 1.0 Gb/s. This Hard Drive is tested good in external USB enclosure on other machines. The machine boots up fine with Knoppix v6.0 Adriane LiveCD, it detects everything from sound, wireless card etc. What do I need to do to get this Hard Drive detected. There are no special settings in PhoenixBIOS that I can play with. All it has is the SATA Native which is enabled. I've tried with 2 different Hard Disks and none is detected - exact same thing No IDE device.

 

What about the hard drive that was in it? Did it die, you aquire it without one? Could actually be a problem with the board if the last drive died or someone sold it to you without a working drive.

If thats not a problem im not sure, I havent seen an HP/Compaq that whitelisted drives in years.

 

The old hard drive didn't die, I just got without one. You could be true that there could be issue with the motherboard but how would I know. The laptop boots up fine with Knoppix V6 Adriane Live CD. I can surf internet, see sound, display and all other things. The lights all light up when the machine is launched. The drive that I am trying to fit is 80 GB and 120GB with 1Gb/s. Anything I put in doesn't show up in the BIOS. It says No IDE Device on self detection in BIOS.

Thanks for your response though. Any other ideas?

 

Can linux disk tools see the HDD devices? Maybe dmesg log will say if they are detected by probe.

What about if you put HDD in the 2nd bay? Is it detected?

 

I haven't checked with the Linux Tool CD but as far as second bay is concerned -- it doesn't discover it. The same message in the BIOS--No IDE Device.

 

Well, most HP laptops came with a plastic adapter which fit on to the HDD SATA pins in order to connect with the motherboard. Since you mentioned that the laptop didnt come with any HDD, make sure that you have this type of adapter...

SATA Hard Drive Connector for HP DV6000 & DV9000 Series
P.S: Dont know if the above one will fit your laptop but provided the link just as an example.

 

Thanks for your response. The HDD fits the Bay only if its fit properly in the caddy along with the adapter. The HDD in my case also fits properly in the bay. The issue is not the fitting of the HDD in the bay, its just that its not detected by the BIOS--NO IDE DEVICE.

 

Is it a SATA or PATA/IDE drive?

Also check the BIOS settings for a native SATA mode setting.

 

Its a SATA drive and the BIOS settings are for a native SATA mode setting.
Thanks for pitchin in!

 

Double check the SATA interposer/connector on the hard drive is pushed all the way in and its seated properly on the hard drive compartment.

 

Its all the way in. I've tried and tested 2 Hard Drives.
Thanks for your response.

 

Still wanting to figure out a way to get the HDD getting detected by the laptop. HP Tech Support says to install HP Certified HDD but which brand of HDD does HP certifies and verifies...

 

HP buys whatever and installs whatever. Ive only owned one of their laptops in recent history and it had a seagate. But I know theyve used even Samsung in their desktops.

Its like a brand name car dealer or factory. Cars leave the factory with whatever brand of tires they happened to have bought for cheap. Ive seen the same car come off a car carrier, 8 of them, all of them with different brand tires. After manufacture sales usually goes to what the customer is willing to pay. Other than the equipment HP does happen to whitelist, hard drives usually arent one of them as said before.

What they want is for u to go into their online store and spend 300 bucks on an 80 GB drive.

 

Thanks for your response ClutchX2. You are exactly right...they want the customer to spend 300 bucks for a stupid 80GB drive that I can get on eBay for 15 bucks. They gave me the part number 590736-001...now I am not able to figure out which Brand of HDD manufactures is that??

 

Its the HP Replacement parts number. I will look it up real quick see if it even mentions anything. They slap a sticker on the parts going in a laptop the sticker is most likley not always a specific part but a part compatible to the one that came in the laptop.

Edit came up a 160 gb hdd give me a sec.

http://h20141.www2.hp.com/HPPARTS/Default.aspx? Just punch in the number under parts. Looks like they want a little over 100 for one and i think 80 for an exchange. I dont see any info to help u find out what the exact model and manufacturer they are using. At least they dont charge what they listed when I had my laptop lol.

 

No such thing as a certified HP drive. Ive had many HP notebooks and theyve come with all different brands. Seagate and Western digital are what ive seen them using lately. They used to use hitachi's on the older pavilions.

 

Thanks for pitching in flipfire, I am still struggling to get the hard disk detected. I know someone was able to successfully install a 500GB hard disk and install Windows 7 on this kindda machine.

 

Alright you fiends, listen up.

The problem has NOTHING to do with the hard drive you're using. This problem would present itself with the factory original hard drives (the laptop model you mention ships with two separate 80GB hard drives installed on a RAID) unless you were restoring from the recovery partition. My recovery partition was corrupted by a massive worm and I was forced to delete it and reinstall from scratch, essentially as if I'd replaced the hard drives.

To the original poster, if you still HAVE the factory original hard drives (both of them) try reinstalling them and see if your systerm runs. If there was no physical problem with them to begin with (and sometimes they would) try to use Disk Management (google it) to figure out which drive hosts the recovery partition. The primary drive will be number 0 (zero), and the secondary hard drive will be number 1 (one). Figure out which drive is which (might just be removing one, leaving the other, and seeing if the computer boots without it, and if not, switching) and THEN install the new hard drive you're trying to switch to. From within Windows (the computer originally shipped with XP Media Center Edition) copy over the recovery partition image, THEN install Windows 7 on your NEW hard drive, and then after you confirm that Windows 7 works, remove the old hard drive. A tricky and extremely technical series of tasks to be sure, and worth a few bucks to pay a tech support person to do it for you.

In case you still don't have the original hard drives (not worth getting replacement ones from HP in my opinion) and for everyone else: this is a SATA driver issue. Note that I said that this laptop model originally shipped with two separate hard drives. This is extremely unique, as pretty much ANY other laptop out there -- including most HP models -- only has ONE hard drive. This non-standard setup means that the chipset on the laptop motherboard needs a non-standard controller driver to access the hard drives and even see that they are there.

Many desktop computers have multiple hard drives -- this is common, in fact. But because a laptop motherboard and a desktop motherboard have different structures and are just made differently, a SATA controller driver that is comonly usable on a desktop is not usable on this laptop.

When you start the computer and boot directly from a Windows disk, that Winows (regardless if it's XP, Vista, or 7) has on it a wad of "common" drivers to draw from, but it'snot possible to have them "all". Note also that your Windows disk is designed to be able to install on desktops, laptops, tablets, powerPCs, powerMacs, and many other obscure types of systems, and it becomes more obvious why it's just not possible to hve "every" driver in existence. This applies not just for ATA controll drivers, but IDE drivers, chipset drivers, sound drivers, etc. Most of you reading this already know about this because whenever you install Windows and finally "use" it for the first time, not all of the features work right away, and you usually have to install the non-generic driver that's specifically designed for your video card, or your sound card, your printer, etc.

Now the solution for the DV9035nr. You prolly won't like this, dude, but there IS hope.

Go to HP® - Laptops, Desktops, Printers, Servers and more and look for the drivers that are appropriate to your operating system. Note that because of the need for special drivers for pretty much everything on this laptop because it was designed to be top of the line with special everything when it first came out (video, touchpad, sound, etc) that there area LOT of things that just won't fully work without the proper drivers. Note here that hp.com does not list any drivers available except for Vista, Vista-64 bit, XP (all versions), and Windows 2000. If you wanna run Windows 7, you're gonna have to either hope that the generic Windows 7 drivers are good enough (which is possible, but not likely to be true for ALL of them) or you're going to have to HOPE that some hobbyist out there in the world created on from scratch that works (and then you'll have LOTS of certificate and authenticity errors, because a hobyist won't be able to "test" the driver to make sure that it "always" works no matter what programs you use.) HP will likely not make them, but never say never.

I'm installing from a Windows XP Home SP2 cd. The driver that I need for the issue you are running into is sp32492.exe. Downloading the file to another working computer is no problem. But the .exe file will NOT fix your problem by itself.

This self-extracting file has a bundle of related drivers in it, all designed by Intel, which is the company that designed the SATA controller for this computer in the first place. The that I couldn't get around was that the self-extraction method WOULD NOT WORK unless I had an actual dinosaur floppy drive and floppy disk. No thumb drives, no flash drives, no external hard drives, NOTHING else would work. So, I went down to MicroCenter.com, ordered me an external floppy drive (I didn't even know they were still around any more) bought a batch of 20 blank floppy disks (since they'd been sitting ont he shelf for so long because no one buys them, I found that I had to format them even though the package says that they're already formatted) and THEN the driver extracted properly. Do all of this on another, WORKING, computer (to some people that's not so obvious, so I'm pointing it out here).

Now I have a Windows XP cd in the drive of the dv9035nr, the floppy drive hooked up to a USB port, and I fire it up. Be sure to hit F10 when you get the option to make sure that your boot sequence is up to snuff. Make sure to restore all BIOS defaults first, then my boot order is USB floppy, USB external, CD-rom, internal hard drive, then the others, and with the network boot option last (which should be disabled by default ayway). Make sure that "native SATA" is ENABLED, SAVE your changes, then reboot. During the startup sequence, be sure to hit F6 before it's too late to specify a special SATA / RAID controller driver. It won't be immediately obvious if you hit it in time, because there are other things Windows has to do AFTER you hit F6 but BEFORE you have to do anything about it.

With the mostly-blank floppy in the drive, when you get the option, hit S to SPECIFY driver. You wikll be brought to a blue menu screen. There is a list of like half a dozen driver options. I'm not sure exactly what they all do. I suppose that Intel made several different controllers that all use the same set of drivers, but it's still necessary to specify which controller you have since the diferent controllers use the drivers in different ways (I'm guessing). Notice that in the right side of the menu, some are listed "DESKTOP" and othersare listed as "MOBILE". This laptop is mobile, and I was prepared to just run trial and error through them all, but I tried the first MOBILE option first. So far, it seems to be going well (I'm typing this while my Windows is installing) so we'll see.

Hope that helps!

 

I will update how it all goes. I will have to get a Floppy Drive and blank floppies...didn't know that I would need the floppies still after so many years(last time I used 3½-inch was in 2000 I guess). I too had this last idea in my mind but didn't get to it thinking it might not work even though this was the only thing to update the BIOS or to get the freaking Hard Disks recognized.
Thanks a lot for taking your time out first to figure out the issue for yourself and then typing the solution here. I appreciate that and will keep posted as to how did my exercise go.

 

NP bro. Incidentally, do note that you can update the BIOS from within windows without needing to resort to a floppy drive. This generally means that you "could" install Windows first before flashing the BIOS. However, since it'll be necessary to get the fdd anyway, and the drivers "might" work better with an up-to-date BIOS flash (I'm guessing) then perhaps getting that out of the way won't hurt.

Update: My last Windows install attempt errored out, for some reason saying that it couldn't detect the .sys file form my fdd that carried my SATA controller driver. This is odd, since it DID recognize my hdd, which should have meant that the driver was already in memory, which should make for no reason to have to "look" for the file on the fdd. Since I left the damn thing unattended, I'm not sure if this was a result of a normal reboot during the install process or not. I'm reattempting now.

Separately, I cannot report much reason to think that the multiple options on the blue menu I described have much difference between them. I've tried another one, with equally good results (it can recognize both hdd's and am watching it format as I type this, which means the SATA controller is working with the drivers properly).

Additionally, I had the idea to copy the extracted files from my fdd to a thumbdrive. (For the longest time, I tried using a thumbdrive to offer the self-extracting .exe file, and was always confused that the only hdd the system could detect was so small and formatted so quickly. The system was treating my thumbdrive as the only installed hdd, so I take that to mean that thumbdrives CAN be used to offer files to the process.) So, I extracted the .exe to the fdd the way it wanted, and then copied those files to my thumbdrive, thinking I could do the same for you. Well, in mentioning it just now, I just got your hopes up for nothing. For reasons that I do not completely understand, a fdd is simply unavoidable for this scenario.

The good news is that I'd be willing to buy your dv9035nr for parts if you wanna give up on it, saving you the hassle of getting the fdd. Note, since fdd and floppies are so rare nowadays, any store that carries them would likely have to place it on special backorder, delaying your gratification. How much would you want? I'd pay for shipping to the Washington, DC area.

Ciao.

 

I cannot update the BIOS from windows because the HDDs are formatted blank with no OS on them and since none is detected in any bay so no OS can be installed (which is the original problem). The only option is the Floppy Drive route and I had already purchased an IBM USB Floppy drive from someone on eBay for 10 bucks, now need the floppy media (which I might have somewhere in desks..lol). If you want a similar HP you can find tons at eBay for dirt cheap and since these HP models are very very famous for the GPU issues ..lol, there was a litigation http://www.nvidiasettlement.com/pdfs/NVF_NOT.pdf for these faulty nVidia GPUs and eventually public won .

Thanks again for your help and I will keep posted once I get to work on it.

 

Do note that the BIOS flash utility is larger than 3 MB in size -- more than double the size of the largest floppy. There might not even be a fdd flash option.

Update: I received the same error message as before immediately after the hdd format completed. It says that the file (iaStor.sys, in my case, and yes, I copied the same case usage) cannot be copied from the fdd. I could retry, skip the file, or cancel altogther. Retrying did nothing (with no provision to attempt it with a different menu choice on the driver selection) and hitting ESC to skip the file only repeated the process. After skipping for the third time, however, there's an -ton of files being copied FROM my cd-rom TO my hdd. Promising noises indeed!

 

Well. Irony abounds.

My software fixes worked, all the way up to needing to import the chipset drivers. Now the screen is cracked. Wonderful.

Hope my advice helped. Any idea where to find another one of these units? Checking on eBay showed LOTS of parts but no working units.