Unable to see 500GB Samsung HM500JI in Bios dv6775us

I recently have installed a 500GB sata Samsung hard drive Model#HM500JI 5400rpm/8M in to the dv6775us notbook. I am unable to see the hard drive through the bios and unable to boot to it. I have recently received a set of Application and Driver Recovery CDs for this machine with Vista on the CDs and was able to restore the OS on to the hard drive. One of the solutions I was looking to was to update the bios. The only way I can update the bios is through DOS since I cannot get into windows, but I have been unable to flash the bios using a 98 boot disk, phlash16.exe and f.58 bios update 30CCF58.WPH file. I can boot up into DOS and get the "A:\" prompt and I can run the phlash16.exe utility. The utility starts to load the bios file and gets to 100%, the progress bar goes away and nothing else happens. The questions are; would I be going at the problem of not seeing the Samsung hard drive by updating the bios be the correct direction and are there any parameters that I need to use when executing phlash16.exe utility. If there is any more information you need please let me know.
Thanks much,
Kevin Stadler

EDIT: The dv6775us is an HP Pavillion Entertainment series 6000 laptop. Another thing is I have been able to boot to Ubuntu with my flash drive and was able to see the samsung hard drive.

 

the drive might not be supported by hp .... so u might not be able to use it...

 

I did talk to HP and they said the largest HDD was 250GB. I have seen some signatures in this forum having a 500GB HDD for this model but I am not sure what the brand of HDD they are using.

One of the signatures that saw had WD 500GB 5400RPM, is WD compatible because it only has 2 platters?

 

if could give some details of what laptop u have , what CPU u have , chipset etc, it would help... give a screenshot of what PC wizard 2009 shows for your laptop... in the general part of it and the motherboard part..

 

System summary
Mainboard : Quanta 30D2
Chipset : Intel GM965
Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile T5500 @ 1666 MHz
Physical Memory : 3072 MB
Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
Hard Disk : WDC (250 GB)
DVD-Rom Drive : TSSTcorp CDDVDW TS-L632N ATA Device
Monitor Type : SAMSUNG - 15 inches
Network Card : Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN
Network Card : RTL8101 PCIe Fast Ethernet Adapter
Operating System : Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium Home Edition 6.00.6000
DirectX : Version 10.0
Windows Performance Index :

Motherboard
Manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard
Mainboard : Quanta 30D2
Bios : Hewlett-Packard
Chipset : Intel GM965
Physical Memory : 3072 MB DDR2-SDRAM
LPC bus : Yes
PCI Bus : Yes
Bus PCI-Express : Yes
USB Bus : Yes
SMBus/i2c Bus : Yes
Bus HyperTransport : No
Bus QPI : No
Bus CardBus : No
Bus FireWire : Yes

I went out and bought a 250GB WD HDD as you can see but am still wondering if it's possible to install the 500GB Samsung HDD.

 

Well, what HP said is BS. I have the same notebook, see my sig, and the WD 500GB drive works great.

 

deeastman, was there anything special you had to do to make your computer see the hard drive? Was there a bios version you had to upgrade to to see the drive?

 

No. I am using the latest bios listed for our laptops F.58 A, been using that rev. from almost day one.

The only thing different from the summary list you posted is that my chipset identifies itself as a PM965, CPU is T5450, and Monitor is something other than a Samsung (could look it up again but not relevant). Oh, and I also upgraded to 4G of memory (again, not relevant).

My WD 500GB drive installed just as easy as installing a new OS to the original 250GB drive and is just as quiet.

Edit: After re-reading your post one other difference between our setups, but I can't say it would make a difference, is that I never tried installing my 500GB drive while I had Vista on my laptop. I bought my 500GB drive specifically to make the transistion to Windows 7, so the only OS my laptop has seen with the 500GB HD is Win 7.

 

If Ubuntu can see the HDD then there is nothing wrong with either the HDD or the BIOS.

The problem may be that the Windows Vista installer needs you to load a special driver (the press F6 option early in the installation). Windows 7 has the drivers preloaded.

John

 

Perhaps the Samsung drive is defective? Did you try to access the drive with Ubuntu you mentioned in your first post? Do you have an external enclosure you can put the Samsung drive into and see if you can access it since you now have a working notebook again with the 250GB WD.

If the Samsung is indeed defective, consider returning it for either the WD500GB 5400rpm or the new Hitachi 500GB 7200rpm drive.

 

Since Windows 7 is based on Vista I doubt that is the issue as both the WD and Samsung drive are both Sata. But, that theory would be easy to test out if the OP wanted to experiment a bit.

You can download a working copy of Windows 7 for free (gives you a 30 day trial) from this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=428068. Go to the bottom of post 1 and download the ISO for the 32bit version, just to minimize the headaches. Burn the ISO to DVD and install.

Install it on your Samsung drive and see what happens. Win 7 takes less than 30 minutes to install, heck I would do it just for the fun of it. What do you have to lose.

 

This was a new install, I was replacing a bad HDD with the 500GB Samsung. So there was no operating system when I installed the drive, I just used the restore disks and restore MS Vista.

I will try this to see if Win 7 can see it an boot to it.

Thanks a lot for all the help guys.

 

I would return the samsung and get the hitachi 7K500 500GB drive... it's the fastest mobile drive and runs way cooler than this 3 platter drive... you also should have no problems with this drive...