Compaq Presario 6330 Hard Drive Problems

[astead]

Hello,

I am new to forum. Spent some time the last couple of days trying to get my daughter's Compaq Presario 6330us working. Machine came with two CD/DVD drives, a floppy drive, and a Maxtor 60GB hard drive.

She was not able to boot XP from her hard drive. Her boyfriend had previously tried to recover from recovery CDs, but with no luck. I tried installing a new hard drive (Seagate 160GB) with new one as primary master and old one as primary slave. That didn't work. Didn't recognize either drive. Then took out old drive and used new drive only. Was then able to recover the system. Worked fine for a few hours.

Tried using it later the same day. It had gone to sleep after I thought I had it fixed and reinstalled a lot of her software. When Itried to wake it up, the system froze. Upon reboot, system was no longer recognizing the new drive. It wouldn't let me do another recovery since it can't find a hard drive to recover to. Just keep getting Boot Failure message. Tried new IDE cabling but didn't help. The BIOS is just not detecting the hard drive. Recognizes the 2 CD/DVD drives and floppy drive fine.

I suspect the IDE controller for the hard drive(s) is bad. Can I just install a new card with a new controller rather than repalcing motherboard? Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

 

[raybay]

Anything you do with a Presario 6330 is likely to be trouble and disappointment.
I would replace the EIDE cables, then download all the patches, BIOS, and other drivers and downloads from the www.hp.com site for Presario 6330US. Obtain a copy of WXP Service Pack 2 from Microsoft just in case you can use it ($3.95 from Microsoft).
Give it your best shot with the BIOS and Patch... if it still doesn't detect the drive, consider this an opportunity to get something decent. If it does detect, reformat and reinstall everything, then the entire download set, then run the Windows Service Pack 2 disc. You should then be ok.
This computer has been almost as much trouble as the eMachines desktops, and the failures are too often not fixable.
If money is a problem, take a look at www.pcsurplusonline.com and others that have ruggedized used Dells and IBMs... better than a cheap new one... although you will have to find Windows somewhere.