"Hard drive not detected"

Several weeks ago, I sent my HP notebook PC back for repairs, and before I did I created a Norton Ghost image of the hard drive. (The OS I was using at this time was XP, which I had installed over the Vista that it had originally come with.) I got the notebook back and discovered that they had restored the hard drive to factory condition, so I removed the laptop hard drive from the HP notebook, put it in an external enclosure, and connected it to my desktop. I made a backup of the "recovery partition" that the notebook hard drive came with and then deleted both the Vista OS partition and recovery partition from the disk. At this point, the disk was unusable, so I created a new partition which used the entire hard drive (rather than splitting it into separate parts). I then copied all of the files back onto the hard drive, including the contents of the Windows folder, etc.

After I had copied all of the files over to my laptop hard drive, I turned off the external enclosure, removed the laptop hard drive, and re-installed the laptop hard drive in my HP notebook. When I tried booting up, I got an error telling me that there was an error when trying to access the hard drive. I put in my Windows XP CD, and tried installing a fresh copy of XP. The startup process told me that the installer could not find a usable hard drive, and shut down.

I think that the problem may be with nomenclature. In order to make the laptop hard drive usable so that I could move files to it from my desktop, I assigned it a drive letter and gave it the name "laptop." All of the operating system files and such are on the root of the drive, but the laptop does not detect the disk. How do I remedy this?

 

Your XP won't install without a SATA driver.

But I wonder why it didn't work from the image. Are you sure you copied everything back correctly?

 

When you deleted all the partitions your boot sector was lost, that is why you can’t boot it up now. As NJoy said, _Windows XP cannot see SATA hard disks without a driver. You can either slipstream it in to the installation or give it at the installation time.

 

I can go into the BIOS to disable SATA, so that's less of a priority for me. Right now my biggest issue is trying to boot so that I can get everything returned to normal. I tried installing a fresh copy of XP and all I got was an option to format the hard disk, I wasn't able to install the OS and after putting the laptop hard drive in an enclosure my desktop reports that the laptop hard drive isn't formatted. How do I go about making my system bootable? Right now I'm downloading Knoppix (a Linux distro that runs from the CD drive) but I'm not sure if I'll be able to use it to create a permanent fix.

 

Moving the laptop HDD and swapping with the desktop PC may cause some problem like the incorrect partition info. This will cause the OS installation to fail.

Try use the disk management boot disk to delete all partition on the HDD and repartition again on the laptop, not to partition the HDD on the desktop using external case and move to the laptop.

Before doing any partition, remember to backup the files you needed.

Hope this helps!
Bill

 

It seems that I can't do anything to the laptop hard drive using the laptop. Both Windows XP and Windows Vista installation disks fail to recognize that the hard drive exists, I've tried this both with and without SATA support.

 

What is your computer model, and hard disk model (both new and old) ?

Vista does not need special drivers to detect a SATA disk (assuming you have a SATA disk). Reset the BIOS, set the boot order to boot from the CD drive, connect the HDD and then boot with the Vista installation disk.

BTW, can the Windows XP or Vista installation still detect the your old hard disk ?

 

Shouldn't the image have the proper boot sector info?

 

I just restored the hard drive from the Norton Ghost image rather than copying all of the files over to a pre-made partition, and I'm getting...nothing. Rather than any error messages, I just get a blank screen after having the option to hit F10 to enter BIOS. When I try booting up with the Windows XP disc in the drive, I get a message that says "press any key to boot from CD" but hitting a key just produces a "beep" noise. I can access the restored hard drive fine from my desktop but not when inside the laptop.

My notebook is a dv9000t and the hard drive model number is WD1200BEVS.