Satellite Laptops :: A-Series models

[Nuclearr]

I tried searching to see if this had been discussed before but because it is so particular it was hard to find the answer.

A little backround.

I have a A75-s209 running XP SP3. It has all the original hardware. I recently wanted to upgrade the hard drive and found that due to my laptop only supporting IDE I was limited on speed and cache size. Because of this I wanted to find a way to add a SATA drive to the computer. After some research I discovered that I could put a drive into a caddy that goes into the CD/DVD slot. I got the caddy and out it into the laptop and the laptop did not recognize it. Once in windows I popped the drive out and then back in to force windows to recognize it which it did. But here is the problem....

When I reboot the computer no longer recognizes the drive. I know that this is due to the BIOS not seeing the drive. I was told that I need to update the BIOS which I did but it did not fix the problem. I also found that I may need to create a custom driver set to get the BIOS to recognize the drive. Since the drive is a Hitachi drive I tried finding drives on there site but they unfortunatly do not list any, at all.

My ultimate goal would be to remove the original hard drive and use the new drive to boot from. So, is there another way around this? Is there anything that I can do about this? Any help would be appreciated.

[Techman]

Deos Device manager say which port or bus the drive is being recognized on?  I don't have that model, but mine CD drive shows up on the USB bus.  So I would think that could be the problem.

Also, you could try F12 after powering on to see what the boot devices menu shows.

This is a new one for me though.

[Nuclearr]

The drive identifies in the Disk Drive tab and under the second IDE channel. Is there a way to manually input drivers in the BIOS. I find it strange that XP recognizes the drive but then the upon restart the BIOS failes to see it.

[Techman]

How are you sure the BIOS is not seeing the drive?  Is this because you wnet into BIOS and it was not listed?

You might want to try making a Ubuntu live disc and boot off that and see if the drive is recognized.  This woudl bypass the current drivers and Windows for that matter, and see if it works with a different software setup.  Ubuntu is Linux, but it is nothing to be scared of, and a live CD of it, won't intall it unless you tell it to, but it will let you boot it as if it was installed to the CD.

[Nuclearr]

Yeah if I go into the BIOS it does not recognize the drive. I tried booting from the windows CD but because the drive is in an caddy which is now it the optical bay where the CD drive normally is, I used an external DVD/CD burner. Windows would not boot from this because it was 'not a recognized CD ROM'. I can't take out the Hard Drive that would defeat the purpose.

I can try to see if the Ubuntu Live can get the drive to recognize. If it does then what are my options? Also if I manually load the drivers into the registry will that make a difference? Thanks for you suggestions.  

[Techman]

Is that the Insyde BIOS?  My Toshiba BIOS doesn't list a optical drive, but my Insyde BIOS computer does.

So if it is not listed, then maybe it is a device nto supported by BIOS, but needs a OS to support it. Plug and play things are that way.

Maybe forcing the driver is that way to go.  Maybe timing is the issue, i.e. the driver is loading too soon in the boot order.   I think that is the direction I would try.