HD problem with HP laptop

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mke

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Hello all,

i hope someone has experience on this as i am really frustrated. I bought a Hitachi IC25N080ATMR04-0 80Gb disk and i cant seem to get it to format when i first installed it.
My notebook is a HP Pavillion ZE4200 purchased with a 30Gb Toshiba disk (MK3021GAS). Now that i installed the 80gb hitachi disk, the format from windows stops at 99% and reports that windows cannot be installed on this disk as it might be damaged. This got me worried as it has happened in the past where i ended buying 2 x Toshiba 40Gb disks which had the exact same problem. (i use them now perfectly on my desktop and not on the laptop).

I tested the new hitachi drive now with the fitness test and it reports no error on the quick test. On the advance full test it reports an error code 0x41 - Bad Cable, and that i should replace the ATA cable and run the test again. That got me confused as which ATA cable can i change? its a laptop and i dont see any ATA or non cables in it. Only the screen cables and the mouse/keyboard cable exists in there, all other is motherboard?????
Has anyone any recommendation on this, as it can't be that 3 drives have problem and there is no ata cable there (except if its meant that the board is dying, which has returned no errors on all other major tests i have made to it with other little tools. The old 30Gb disk works fine, the 40 gb disks had problems even loading windows when on the laptop (when i managed to format them on the desktop and then install them on laptop). and finally the 80 gb disk has the exact same problem. Is there any firmware/bios/motherb/or anything else that i could upgrade/fix?

I am sorry if i have confused a lot or wrote to much, but am really dissapointed by hp as even they verified to me by multi emails that the disks are compatible and everything.

Thanks for listening and hope that someone helps me out and all others with tech problems :)

Byes for now
 
What are you formatting the drive as? Windows cannot create FAT32 filesystems bigger than 32GB.

Also, there is a 65536 cylinder (~33GB) hard drive limit in some BIOSes. You should check with HP if drives bigger than 30GB are supported and if there is a BIOS update.
 
i,

thanks for the quick reply. It seems that the format completed now and i am installing windows on it with no problem i hope. I had the current BIOS update (1.59) when i purchased the 40Gb disks and they didnt work as i was then (2 months ago) instructed by HP to update the BIOS. I checked now for a newer BIOS update on their site and found that 1.60 is the newest one and a note that it fixes the problem with other hard disks being rejected. Now (hopefully) i will be a happy 80gb user :)
Thanks for the help as buying 70GBP disks worth is not my favorite task , especially when i end up using them on my desktop.

Byes :)
 
hi there,

it seems that the problem persists. I left the laptop close for a few hours when i had it running allnight with no problems and when i opened it, windows couldnt be loaded. I then checked the setup on bios and the 80gb disk was shown as 70.13gb. (samething was happening with 40gb disks -- to smaller size in the past). I have plugged in and plugget out the disk and trying to restart windows succesfully for the past 1.5+ hour which in the end boot up normally and recognised the disk.
I have contacted hp but had no reply yet. the bios is the latest one and it was supposed to fix this problem. I have checked everywhere on the net to find a similar problem/solution but had no luck.

Any advice would be really gratefull as i dont know what to do and i know for sure that i'll get a "dodgy" response from hp, saying either to send it to them( which i cant afford in any case) or that the disk should be working as it is the correct specs as the previous two disks i had tried.
Well atleast i got these replies from them in the past and i am starting to lose patience with them as i liked them in the past.

note: i noticed under event viewer-->system a wierd error: (The driver detected that the device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has its write cache enabled. Data corruption may occur.)
Why could writing to cache cause harm when i already tested succesfully the disk (when it was recognised by bios) and the disk supports it.

also wanted to mention that the partition i created is ntfs, not fat32.
anyways. thats it. i would be more than gratefull if anyone could help me solve this picle as i am getting really tired and dissapointed.
thanks
 
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