Last summer, my laptop started blue-screening. In the bios settings, about half the times I checked, no hard drive was recognized. When I called Gateway, it happened that the BIOS *did* recognize the HDD, so they wanted over $300 to fix it (warranty had just expired.) I thought nah. Yet nothing I could think of helped the computer, so it was off to the best tech I knew, and he determined (quickly, I thought) that it wasn’t the hard drive – it was the motherboard. By this time, the computer would rarely even boot, giving me the message that no OS was found, obviously no HDD found. So that computer has been in the closet since last summer.
The other day, I bought one of those hard drive “enclosures” that lets you make an external USB2 hard drive from a 2.5″ notebook drive. I put the notebook’s HDD in there, and as an external drive, it works just fine.
However: I set my new laptop to boot from the external USB HDD, and guess what? It starts to boot into XP (new one has Vista) but bluescreens just past the XP logo.
So: it was the hard drive all along, nay? Maybe a bad boot sector, something like that? Something tells me that, had I bought a new hard drive for the older laptop, I’d have been good to go. What do you experts think? And have you any suggestions for further tests I could try, to make sure before I shell out for a hard drive?
INKY : )
