How universal are laptop hard drives?

hockey_man · 04-26-2008, 11:21 AM

Kwe/Good morning,

I have an HP Pavillion dv5000 laptop which came with Windows XP. I've been using it for a year and a half and suddenly it is in some devilish reboot loop.

If I turn it on, it does the traditional hardware checks with no errors. When it gets to the Windows XP logo, if lasts for maybe five seconds and reboots into the "System not shut down properly" screen.

I've tried restarting in "Safe" mode and every other mode offered but I get the same results. When I did the system check of the hard drive (both short AND long), it says the drive is fine. I tried booting from a CD but that won't work. Yes, I went into the configuration to change the boot device from hard drive to CD. I used an IBM USB floppy drive but it doesn't even recognize it. Being IBM, I can't say I blame the HP.

At this point, I'm figuring either a RAM problem OR a corrupted Windows file and I'm curious if I can just plug the drive into any other laptop. I realize SOME of the hardware won't match but it should still allow me to get into safe mode long enough to do a backup, eh?

I plan on ordering a new laptop in a few months anyway but I'd like to think I might be able to get my data off the old one before I ship it back to HP in little, tiny pieces. It was $1500 so I expected it to last at least three years. Silly me.

And I promised myself I wouldn't go off on a rant about these !#$^^& companies that outsource their tech support to some third world armpit where everyone is named Rahib and their English skills are just slightly better than my cat's. So no rant, okay?

Speedracer · 04-29-2008, 03:25 PM

they're pretty universal. I got a 250GB for my macbook and it installed with no issues. In fact, I thought I'd screwed something up because it was so flawless... ;)

Just make sure you get the right kind of drive for your laptop. Newegg has some pretty solid deals on their stock.

BTW: If you try to reinstall windows on top of itself you might get lucky. Could be a corrupted registry.

hockey_man · 04-30-2008, 07:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Speedracer

they're pretty universal. I got a 250GB for my macbook and it installed with no issues. In fact, I thought I'd screwed something up because it was so flawless... ;)

Just make sure you get the right kind of drive for your laptop. Newegg has some pretty solid deals on their stock.

BTW: If you try to reinstall windows on top of itself you might get lucky. Could be a corrupted registry.

Ke welalin/Thank you very much!

I'll have to check out Newegg later. I'm hoping to go from the original 100 Gb. to 200 Gb. or more. Then it's hoping and praying my rescue disks work. I've tried them in the CD but get an error about no system.

Maybe my CD is also shot?

Speedracer · 05-01-2008, 04:53 PM

You might be able to set it up as a slave drive and extract data off the disk, but it looks like its days as a bootable drive are gone. :(

hockey_man · 05-01-2008, 06:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Speedracer

You might be able to set it up as a slave drive and extract data off the disk, but it looks like its days as a bootable drive are gone. :(

My thoughts exactly. I'm thinking it's probably some corruption in the Windows Registry. It's odd that the drive passes the diagnostics and only fails once Windows starts to load.

I ended up deciding to buy the 500 Gb. Phantom USB hard drive equipped with Windows Vista. I'll probably TRY to copy off what's on the original 100 Gb. drive and replace it with a 250 Gb. drive. Then comes the fun of trying to restore from my XP rescue disks and updating it based on my backup to the new drive.

All I'm waiting for is an okay from my bank to refinance my car, an '87' Plymouth Reliant, to pay for it all. According to the Blue Book, it should just about cover it.

It's too bad, really. I only had two more payments on it. :)

leghumpingjihadkiller · 05-14-2008, 05:02 PM

This is why you should partition your drives. If you'd partitioned the drive and left only XP (and related required software) on your C:> and put all your other programs and data on another partition (pick your letter, anything from D-Z), you'd only be trying to fix the partition instead of the whole drive.

Since I was forced to go back to XP (though I still use Linux), I have 6 partitions over 3 physical drives. I also have 2 different CD/DVD emulators, which each take a drive letter. I have lettered drives from A-Z with about 4 or 5 letters unused.

hockey_man · 05-15-2008, 08:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by leghumpingjihadkiller

This is why you should partition your drives.

Welalin/Thank you for the suggestion.

It won't be my first task, recovering the original drive will be. But once that's done, I should be able to figure out how much space I need for the OS and Software (with room for additional products) and how much is actually data.

I've gotten spoiled by buying computers with the OS already installed. Back in the old days, you had to do a low level format, partition the drive (32 Mb. was the maximum size for the primary DOS partition and 2 Gb. the maximum for any other drive), then format each drive before adding software/data. Ah the good old days!