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hard drive issues

post #1 of 7
5/13/06 at 2:47am
Thread Starter 
Hello all! I'm new here and i'm trying to upgrade the hard drive on my laptop. I have an ECS 540 running winXP It originally had a Hitachi Travelstar 40GB hard drive. I want to replace it with a Western Digital 80GB WD800 Scorpio drive.

My first attempt I popped the drive (the WD) right into the laptop and tried the recovery disk - it didn't work; it said that there was a missing file.

I pulled it out and formatted it to NTFS then put it back in and tried the recovery disk again. This time it saved a whole bunch of files on the drive, but when i restarted, it wouldn't boot. I gave the recovery disk 2 more tries to get Win XP on the drive, but it still didn't boot.

i pulled the drive again and formatted it again. This time I used Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools to copy the partition from the original drive to the new one. All but three files (i didn'twrite down the names, but i do remember that they were .ink files) were transfered over. Then I put it back into the laptop but it still won't boot.

I tried getting into the BIOS, but haven't found the magic button yet. I'd really appreciate any help getting the drive to boot.

thanks - Aaron
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post #2 of 7
5/13/06 at 3:30am
You need to boot the OS CD. This will set the drive up as a boot drive and copy all the files needed. Your probably going have to get into the bios to change the boot sequence. Keep watching your laptop on bootup to see how to get into bios. GL
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post #3 of 7
5/13/06 at 4:49am
Thread Starter 
i already tried running the recovery cd all the way through on a new partition then botting without the drive and it didn't work. I don't have an OEM XP cd
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post #4 of 7
5/14/06 at 5:55pm
The recovery cd is usually just to recover the existing drive. If you dont have a os cd, oem or other, you may be in trouble.If you have a license you can purchase a cd from a few shady retailers or download the iso from the net and use the key that you have. If xp was installed on the other drive by an oem use a program like pcwizard to get the key that was used to install. GL
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post #5 of 7
5/14/06 at 10:56pm
just use http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoff...r&pvid=ghost10 or sumin like that, i think that will take care of ur problem
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post #6 of 7
5/15/06 at 3:41am
Thread Starter 
I used Western Digital's Lifeguard tools which have a partition copy program... which i used to clone the original drive, but with no luck
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post #7 of 7
5/15/06 at 11:52pm
just copying the partition wont make it bootable. If you purchased your laptop recently get support, you should have gotten a way to recover your os. Also if your using an oem instal with the key sticker, and your on broadband, download an oem version from bittorrent, make an iso image and boot it. This should be ok since you already have an oem license. GL
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