Installed new harddrive, now laptop wont work.

[charlesdurte]

I replaced my laptops (Toshiba satellite pro L450-17K) hard-drive with a new one (Samsung HN-M250MBB 250GB 2.5 Inch SATA 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive).

I then ran a recovery disk (it was a windows vista disk, the laptop had originally came with windows 7, but I lost the disk. Vista has worked before on this laptop though). .

The disk ran and when it was finished i ejected the disk and turned the computer back on. A screen came up saying 'Setup is preparing your computer for first use'. After a few moments of this the screen went blue and a message came up saying 'Windows Setup could not configure Windows on this computer's hardware'.

I was under the impression that all I would need to do was insert a new hard drive and then run the recovery disk, but this is obviously not the case. If anyone could tell me what it is I am doing wrong I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank, Charles.

 

[Joe C]

Seagate owns Samsung, so try SeaTools for DOS and see if the drive shows any errors
SeaTools for DOS tutorial
If the drive checks out to be o.k., then format the drive first and see if that works. You should get an option to format during the Vista install

 

[charlesdurte]

Thanks for the reply Joe.

I ran Seatools and it told me the harddrive passed.

I then reran the Windows Vista recovery disk and when it was finished I again got to a blue screen with a loading circle, to again be told 'Windows Setup could not configure Windows on this computer's hardware'.

Will this be because the hard drive was not formatted,(Vista never gave me the option). Is there a program like seastools i can download, that will format the disk?

Thanks

 

[strollin]

Have you used that recovery disk to install Vista before? It might be that the recovery disk depends on a recovery partition on the drive and does the recovery from there.

You may need to acquire a Vista install disk in order to do a clean install.

 

[Joe C]

I agree.... The Vista recovery disk you have probably is probably not for that laptop and it won't work

You can get a Windows 7 (original?) recovery disk from Toshiba, explain to them that you had to replace your hard drive and need the recovery disk to replace the operating system. They usually charge $20.-$30. for these disks but it's cheaper than going out and getting an oem\retail windows disk. You should get the drivers and bloatware with the new disk

I took the liberty to check and it is $30. you can start the process to order your disk here
http://forums.toshiba.com/t5/System-Recovery-and-Recovery/Recovery-media/m-p/9148#U9148

 

[charlesdurte]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Followed the link you gave me and managed to come across a Windows 7 download, loaded it up and put in my product key and its working now.

Thanks