Momentus XT, Momentus, Momentus Thin, MobileMax, and other notebook drives

[Makkster]

Just recently I've received delivery of a new Momentus XT Hybrid 500gb.

I'm not the most technical persion when it comes to installing stuff in pcs but I decided to install it straight away on my Laptop.   The laptop is a Dell XPS M1730. 

Initially I removed the existing hard drives (both are seagates as well)  and replaced it with the new Momentus.   On Boot the drive isn't seen, i get an error code PXE-61. 

Getting increasingly frustrated after trying all kinds of boot combinations in the bios and sata settings I eventually found a useful post on these forums which allowed me to make some progress.

So I put the old drive with windows back in and put the momentus XT in the secondary drive bay.   This allowed me to go into windows and then create a basic partition for the secondary drive.   From here I then installed windows on to the XT drive.

Next when I reboot after the bios check there's an option on screen asking me which version of windows to load.   So with this method i'm able to load either from the old drive or the new XT drive.

However I don't particularly want or need to have a dual boot pc so I remove the old one and try to reboot with only the new XT drive in.   No chance the system doesn't find the drive, operating system at all.   If I put the old drive in again so that it will dual boot then all is fine and I can choose which drive to boot from.

So,  please does anyone have ideas why this is the case, why I couldn't just get the system to boot from dvd and install windows to the new drive alone or why I'm now stuck with having to have two drives in with windows on them?

[Makkster]

Some further info which shows the world of pain installing this drive has gotten me in to.

So I got to a point earlier where I was able to boot the laptop and then choose to either load from the old hd into windows 7 or load into the new hybrid drive with win 7.  Good stuff, except that I dont want a dual boot system, also the old drive with win 7 on is almost full and I have a spare drive which is larger which I want to replace the old drive with. 

The aim being to have the primary drive which is the 500gb hybrid drive with windows installed and then a secondary seagate drive with 320gb on it.

Unfortunately I cant get this to happen and I'm at the end of the road of possibilities that I can try out now without help.

It seems now that no matter which drive I put into the laptop in any combination that either they fail to boot or they fail to be visible in the bios.   If I plug the drives into an external exclosure they all work and I can view files on them from my desktop pc.  Perhaps the mother board is now at fault?  I don't know.  Could the installation of the drive or updating of the hyrbrid drives firmware to v24 prior to installation of windows somehow screwed up the motherboard?

Unfortunately I cant even put things back as they were since now when I put any drives in I either get errors saying that the drive isnt even found or I get errors reporting that vital files were not found and would I like to repair windows with the recovery disk which incidentally also doesn't work.

When the laptop did boot into windows the old drive was configured as C:  and the hybrid was configured as J:    Now when I plug the old drive into the enclosure it reads as drive J:  when I view it from my desktop.    Would this be causing errors?

I'm at a loss now as to what to try next, any ideas? I'm sure the motherboard is still ok as everything was working at one point this morning.

[Makkster]

There's been a lot of views of this thread but unfortunately no replies.

Anyway after much trial and a lot of error I have finally gotten this drive working.

The final solution was to put the hybrid drive in to an external exclosure then attach that to the laptop.   Using the seagate tools I cloned the existing internal HDD on to the the hybrid drive.  I then removed the internal drive and put the new hybrid drive in.   This booted and worked correctly.   Next I inserted the win 7 64bit disc and installed windows 64 a fresh (I wanted 64 bit and the existing drive only had 32 bit version on it).

After successfully installing win7 64 and launching successfully I was able to then use the windows clean up tool to remove the windows.old file which contained the old version.

The system works now and the drive so far seems good but a problem remains which may or may not be serious.

For some reason when booting the system fails to recognise the ESATA 0 connection so I have had to put this hybrid drive into the other slot ESATA 1.   This means that when booting the laptop there is a brief error message saying that no internal HDD is found before it then moves on to SATA 1 and finds the new drive and then goes on to boot windows.   Now this perhaps means that during these installation attempts perhaps the motherboard is damaged I just don't know enough about this stuff.   I've ordered a new HDD SATA cable to eliminate the possibility that perhaps the cable is damaged.

Throughout this whole process some instructions with the disc would have been handy!!!!!