Packard Bell EasyNote Ajax C3 - Hard drive recognizing problem

So, I have a Packard Bell laptop which seems to function OK except that it has problems with the hard disk. The drive is 250GB toshiba brand drive and this machine shows its size to be 8.4GB ! I did install Windows 7 succesfully but it seems I cannot start it after installation?

 

Do you see the 8,4Gb in BIOS?
Also, when installing windows you have the option to partition the drive, what size do you see then?

Can you check it for errors\bad sectors in another system?

 

Yes, after Windows 7 was installed it just gave BSOD when trying boot it so I went to bios to see what it says about the drive and it indeed claims that the size is 8.4GB. The hard disk is currently in use with another machine and there is no problems. I have checked the disk with Crystaldiskinfo and it is fine so whatever there is wrong it is in this Packard Bell machine.

History of this machine is unknown, all I know that I received it with faulty DC power socket, physically damaged. I replaced it and voila, machine booted and charged battery succesfully. The machine however had troubles even finding the whole damn disk on every boot but that seems to be solved by replacing the bios battery, the one that was inside displayed voltages something like 0.25V so definently bad.

I think Windows 7 should compatible with this machine so it just points to motherboard defect? RAM has been tested and it is good.

 

Check if you have the latest BIOS too.
What SATA mode did you choose?

 

I tried to find bios updates but atleast no official pages list them or any other drivers.
You mean which SATA -mode did I choose in bios? There is no option to change anything. I am currently running Ubuntu on this machine via USB, here is LSPCI -listing>

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 671MX
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS AGP Port (virtual PCI-to-PCI bridge)
00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS968 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 01)
00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev 01)
00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller
00:04.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 191 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev 02)
00:05.0 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SATA Controller / IDE mode (rev 03)
00:06.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge
00:07.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge
00:0f.0 Audio device: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] Azalia Audio Controller
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 771/671 PCIE VGA Display Adapter (rev 10)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

 

i have same problem is there a fix on this yet??

 

I fixed this by simply replacing the hard drive with another. I can't remember if the first one was SATA2 and the replacement was SATA1 or vice versa but after that there was no problems. The another drive also worked fine in another laptop so there was some kind of bizarre compatibility problem, atleast in my case. If I remember correctly, I received the laptop without hard disk and just installed whatever hard disk I happened to have, then I received that another one which just worked.