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    D900T HDD help

    Discussion in 'Alienware Area-51/Aurora and Legacy Systems' started by PCTech_2600, Mar 14, 2014.

  1. PCTech_2600

    PCTech_2600 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I purchased an old Alienware D900T off of craigslist about 8 months ago for $60 (battery still holds a good charge). The person I purchased it from told me that when you turn it on it on it says operating system not found. I thought something might have gotten screwed up with the OS or that the HDD died, so I wasn't too worried about it. The first thing I did when I got it home was pull the HDD out and check it. The HDD was fine so I put it back into the computer and tried to reinstall windows XP on it. After the setup starts and it asks you to press f8 to accept the license agreement, it says no drives detected and that setup cannot continue. I did some research and found that I needed to install the sata378 driver during the setup to get the HDD to show up. I put the driver onto a floppy disk and tried installing the driver during setup. It seemed to install the driver but the HDD still did not show up. I did more research and messed around with BIOS settings (HDD does not show up here either) but still not luck. I have even tried taking the computer completely apart and cleaning the boards and connectors. Still, no luck. I scoured the web trying to find a solution for months until I came upon an article taking about a HDD bay that fits into one of the optical drive bays. The HDD finally showed up in BIOS and during installation and I was finally able to install XP.

    While using the HDD optical drive bay lets me use the computer, I would still like to be able to use the other two HDD slots. Any help would be greatly appreciated :). Feel free to ask questions if you need more info.
    Thanks!
     
    PCTech_2600, Mar 14, 2014
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  2. protivakid

    protivakid Notebook Evangelist

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    First reading signs would point to you did not actually get the right driver. When you press F6 (or whatever key it is) to install the driver are you given multiple options? If so try each one of the drivers. When I was doing XP installs back in the day I remember this was VERY trial & error. Sometimes a driver would say it was for that specific device but it was actually not. Other than that unless the port (or chip that runs it) inside is actually bad (rare but not impossible) I am betting it is a wrong driver.
     
    protivakid, Mar 17, 2014
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