Laptop Hard Drive in carputer...

**Powers** · 04-28-2004, 06:34 PM

I have an 8Gb Laptop Hard Drive that I want to put in my carputer. We took it out of our toshiba tecra 8100 laptop. I got a startech ide adapter to plug it in. Now I have a small problem. When I plug it in, I can't get the hard drive to work properly. the hard drive powers up, and the BIOS recognizes that it's there, but when I try to repartition the hard drive using fdisk, it says that the partition has been developed, but when I exit fdisk and reboot, the partition suddenly dissappears. The thing I don't understand is that it will operate fine when I put it back into the laptop. So I installed DOS and set up all the partitions with the laptop. Then I put it back in the carputer, and it can't find the boot record.
So I tried using a 540Mb hard drive and installed DOS and mpxplay as well as all the other essentials on this drive, and I cannot get it to recognize the drive as a slave, even with the slave jumper set.

Does anyone know how to solve this problem??

**gospeed.racer** · 04-29-2004, 01:45 AM

Originally Posted by Powers

.. it says that the partition has been developed, but when I exit fdisk and reboot, the partition suddenly dissappears.

Ok, this is a long shot, i am sure you probably tried it......but I have had it happen...after fdisking, when you restart...it will usually say that the disk is not found, do you want to retry or something similar....if it says this, let it retry and it will find it. Long shot, but its all i can think of.

Might just wanna put it in a desktop with that adaptor in place of your cd rom so you dont have to slave it. Let XP or whatever you run format it with fat32 and then to be safe do a disk clean up. I have had this work for quite a few laptop drives that I have gotten.

**Powers** · 04-29-2004, 10:39 PM

I've done all of that. It just wont do it. Nothin seems to want to work how it should...

**icet** · 05-04-2004, 10:42 AM

i would try to install window xp..
window xp can partion or format hd very easily...
icet...

**arkadiyp** · 05-04-2004, 10:49 AM

HEre is a stupid question, does the BIOS see it properly? I mean the size and configuration of it?

**Man** · 05-04-2004, 11:26 AM

Now I know this might not be helpful (but then again it might) I have this really old Hard Drive (its a 500 Meg or so CSH (or whatever it is) which some bioses ident as 'Normal' so its not a LBA HDD of course. Now on my old p1 it works fine, however on my newer p4 system the bios sees it, however whatever I try I can not get it to work in DOS (fdisk gives some errors) However, If I boot from another drive Windows XP see's it, and also if I incorectly configure a HDD in the BIOS Windows XP still seems to be able to correctly use the HDD. Maybe you could boot from a small crappy drive, and see if Windows will use your drive :S just a thought.

**CorollaVerso'04** · 05-05-2004, 05:01 PM

Try this: Make 2 partitions. Make the first one (you'll boot from lateron) 1Gb. The rest is for the second partition. Format both partitions NTFS. Install XP on the first partition. Let the bios do it's own recognition (Auto). If your PC will boot from this partition you can resize the first partition to whatever you like, you can even move the whole second partition and make the first partition the maximum size. This worked for me...

**NitroNic** · 05-08-2004, 11:37 PM

Whenever I"m starting clean and want to set up new partitions, I always, right off the bad, remove any and all exiting partitions. Then I would restart, and then create your new partition(s).