Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[GeorgeJ]

Hi all,

I have what sounds like a simple problem, but I cannot figure it out. Windows Vista refuses to boot on my new Seagate hard disk. Whether its my old installation copied over from my old drive or a fresh installation, within less than a second of POST finishing, the system becomes unresponsive and nothing happens.

(My measure of unresponsivness is tapping the caps-lock key to flick the LED on and off, and Ctl-Alt-Del has no effect)

Has anybody ever encounted anthing similar or have any suggestions to try and find the source of the problem?(It seems too early in Windows start-up process for anything to be logged)

Also importantly:

* Linux (from which I am writing this post) has no problems with the drive

* Vista (or Linux) has no problems booting from the old driv

* The new drive is actually from a Seagate Go 320GB (so I would have an external case to put my old drive in)

*SMART tools doesn't report anything unusual (as far as I can tell)

Hardware Specs:

* Dell Inspirion 6400 Laptop

* New Drive Type: ST9320320AS, firmware version BS04

* Old Drive Type: ST9120822AS

Any other information that might help I can provide.

Thanks for your help. This has me stumped.

George

[Cantbecanit]

If it's a sata drive, set your bios to work in ide mode, i.e turn of any AHCI settings and run them as IDE.

[HughR]

Cantbecanit: he's replacing a notebook SATA drive with another notebook SATA drive.  It is unlikely that his BIOS settings would need to change for this.

 GeorgeJ: what did you use to install Vista?  The "restore" disks that came with the notebook (or you made when you powered on the machine for the first time)?  If you used some other source of Vista, it might be missing some Dell drivers that are crucial.  I admit that this is pure speculation.

When I've been in a similar situation, I've done a 100% raw copy of the original hard drive to the new (larger) one.  That resulted in a bootable drive but with a wasteful partition table (the extra disk space isn't covered).  To do the raw copy, I used dd from a bootable Linux CD (copying a disk filesystem that is mounted and being used is likely to fail in subtle ways).  Then I used fdisk to fix up the partition table.  I'm not saying that this is the best technique, just the most brute-force simple one.

Or just stick with Linux.  It's best anyway 

[GeorgeJ]

Cantbecanit:

Thanks. Was simple to eliminate this tho, my latop's BIOS has only one "quiet or performace" hard disk configuation option.

HughR:

Yeh cheers, someone else mentioned trying to use an OEM Vista installtion disk. I did buy my Laptop second hand with no disks unforunately. I will try and track some down and give it a go.

Yep and your right about Linux. I actually only wanted to get windows going again to edit some doc's that were not formatting correctly in Open Office. Maybe Wine is the solution...