Gateway laptop doesn't recognize hard drive

[kibwe76]

Hey TS world. I was given a Gateway laptop model # ML6714. The old owner told me that they was having problems with it and that I could have it. I'm trying to install Vista OS and it's telling me that I don't have a hard drive installed( or something to that effect). Can someone help me with this problem. I have a WD 160gb hard drive installed. Not sure how to fix this. Thanks in advance for all the help.

 

[mailpup]

Are you sure the hard drive hasn't failed?

 

[kibwe76]

how can I check to see if the hard drive has failed Mailpup. I dont know how to do it.

 

[mailpup]

You could remove it from the laptop, place it into an external USB enclosure, plug it into another PC and see if the hard drive is accessible. Alternately, you could install another hard drive in the laptop and see if Vista will install. Keep in mind that any hard drive you try to install in the laptop will have its data wiped out when you install Vista.

 

[mike1959]

Also a good guide to a failed hard drive, is when you power on, you get a screen with name of Pc maker, then a black screen with a single line of white text at the top left;
'O/S not recognised' (or similar).
Another clue, look at the LED's on the front edge of the laptop, look at the one that represents the hard drive, (the icon is a cylinder), if it does not light up at all, then the drive has failed.

 

[kibwe76]

Update

Ok I bought a new hard drive even larger one (500gb). I to install the windows vista on the new hard drive and it froze on the section expanding space (something like that) cant really remember. Up until then everything looked like it was going to work fine. It stayed frozen for about a hr. I really didn't want to stop it so I gave it some time to make sure that's what it was. After stopping it and trying to do it again. I'm getting this now (BOOTMGR is missing). Ok I did some research and it says to burn a vista recovery disc but I'm not sure if that is for people that had a OS on there pc already and now is having problems or is it like my situation. But any way i did that and put the recovery cd in and it wont boot. I went to the bios under the boot label using (phoenix setup utility ver. 77.15) and the cd/dvd is the first boot but nothing is happening at start up. I'm completely confused. HELP

 

[mike1959]

If you bought a new blank HDD, it won't be formatted to suit Windows (NTFS), so you will get the choice to do that from the Vista disc, before installing Vista.
Also it will be worthwhile to divide the 500GB into several partitions.
You can only install Vista from a full (retail or OEM) disc. The recovery disc isn't the full Vista O/S, it just repairs an existing one.
The bootmanager files are created by the Vista install routine, it's mostly all done automatically from the Vista disc.
If you get stuck, just start again. You have the Boot order as
1) CD/DVD 2) On board SATA
So with the Vista disc in drive, power off, then power on and follow the instrucions.
You need to do a full format (in my experience), then create a partition to install Vista onto.
Hope that helps.