New harddrive for laptop not working, any suggestions as to why?

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PJYelton

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We had a harddrive crash a little while ago (one day after warranty expired if you can imagine, coincidence?) and yesterday I went out and bought a new one. This is my first laptop and I had never previously had any experience with this type of thing and the salesguy told me that pretty much any harddrive would be fine and sold me one.

I go home, take out the old drive, insert the new one and pop in the Windows Recovery/Install CD that came with the laptop. After several minutes it boots up to the screen asking if I want to continue setup, recover a Windows problem, or exit, and I click on setup. It then partitions and formats the drive, saves files onto the drive and then says it needs to reboot. Problem is, when it reboots, nothing happens, it shows the loading RAM stage and allows me to enter the F10 settings, but if I let it go past that it just stops, you see a cursor in the top left of the screen but nothing more. If I change the boot settings so that the CD Rom boots first it says "Press any key to boot from CD". If I hit nothing it just crashes like before, if I hit a key it just takes me back into the Windows setup again where I can either exit or just repeat what I did before with the same results. Hard drive test in the F10 settings menu shows no errors on the harddrive.

Like I said, I've never had to do anything like this before, am I possibly doing something wrong? Here are the details:

Laptop: http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/HP_Pavilion_zt3000/4505-3121_16-30598913-3.html

Old Harddrive: http://www.computerhq.com/products/partinfo-id-34163.html

Harddrive I just bought: http://store.yahoo.com/directron/mk8025gas.html
 
Hmm ya know I had a similar problem. Hard drive was there and being recognized, but the comp kept going real slow and wouldn't let me partition it. Come to find out, my cable was on there just enough for it to be seen by the computer, but not on enough to function properly. Perhaps it's not making a good connection to the HD?

About all I can think of besides jumping to the conclusion it's a bad drive.

The HD is infact like 2nd in the boot sequence right?

I really know nothing of laptops though so I'm kind of taking shots in the dark here.
 
Well i don't know how to make the connection any tighter, I don't think thats the problem to be honest but who knows. I've tried both boot sequence, if it boots the HD first it just crashes, if I boot the CD first it'll let me boot from CD but if I don't push a key and it goes to harddrive then again it crashes

So can anyone verify if I did everything right? I don't need a specific harddrive model do I, I can use any standard one that fits right?
 
The new drive would appear to match the specs given by HP for that laptop so can't see that being a problem.
When you inserted the new drive, did you let the Bios redetect it & if so, has it detected it correctly? (ie capacity, LBA etc).
 
hmmm I'd guess just a bad hd, but after samms suggestion partition the drive to 70 gigs, but this would be an extreme long shot. I'm not gonna give reasoning behind this because it sounds really stupid. How old is this laptop?
 
Not sure how to tell if Bios dectected it or not. Basically when the computer loads up it detects the RAM with a message at bottom saying press F10 for setup. Right past this is when it crashes if it tries booting from the drive. If I go into setup the only option that talks about the harddrive is the harddrive test which seems to work just fine.

However when I boot from cd and its saving windows files on to the HD it mentions 80 gigs so at least to that extent it recognizes it.

Laptop is only a little more than a year old, and unfortunately partitioning only 70 gigs didn't do anything.
 
I doubted it would be a problem, definitly not if it was only made a year ago. My guess is just try a bad hard drive, sometimes they get through QC. Thats part of the reason I buy drives locally
 
Ok, I'm going to go out today and return this harddrive and get a different one. I'll let you guys know if this helped. Thanks!
 
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