Hard Drive Failure?

[PBiddy412]

Hello,

I have a HP Pavillion ze4500 laptop and recently while I was on the laptop my hard drive was making clicking noises and my laptop was freezing periodically every 30 seconds for about 4 minutes and then it brought up a blue screen and said dumping physical memory and I rebooted and it then said cannot find operating system. I then got a new hard drive, put it in, and I got the same message. I have a windows xp disk, so I went to load that, it loads, then it goes right back to the setup screen after its done copying files and it will not do anything else. Its stuck with setting up. Is it possible that the bios isn't reading the new HD? I hope someone can help, I'm flustered.

 

[PBiddy412]

I just looked at my bios, it is not noticing my HD, but when I install XP it notices it? I'm not getting it?

 

[Polishwonder74]

Are there any jumpers to set on the new drive? I'm thinking maybe it's set to slave, or something. I've done that sort of thing before. Took me hours to figure out I had the jumper set wrong, you could probably even find a few threads from me doing that a year or 2 ago right here in the forums if you want to have a good laugh.

 

[yangjay]

Had a similar situation where I went to reformat the hard drive and when I load the XP disk it'll get stuck. Got fed up and figure it was the hard drive, just went to buy a new one and it works fine. Other than that, just check your wiring, make sure all the pins are lined up correctly and secure.

 

[PBiddy412]

Thanks for the help, but the suggestion did not work. I don't know what I did wrong and what not?

 

[Creston]

The old harddrive clicking (with a repetitive sound) is definitely a sign of harddisk failure. Dell laptops SUCK (and I support them for a living...), and they have a terrible penchant for just ruining harddisks.

I'm not quite sure what you did with the new harddisk though. You say you got one, but not really what you did with it. Did you take the old harddisk out of the internal cradle, get the new one in the cradle, then put it in your system?

Did you re-install windows? Did you try to turn the Dell Restore CD (If you have one?)

If you can be a bit more specific, I can make a better guess as to what might be wrong.

You might have to wait until Monday for an answer from me, since I usually only browse here at work. You can email me at

Creston at cox dot net

if you want though.

Creston