Giger Fine
Giger Fine
Dell Latitude HDD IDE Question???
Hey there folks, Basically I bought this sweet laptop from ebay (ya I know) Everything is sweet and just fine, except The system cannot dtermine the hard drive. I plug’d the 20 giger in and still no go. I do know the 20 gig’r work’s, because I tried it on my other dell. On the ebay page it claims that the “Hard Drive IDE conntroller is not working” What could possibly be the cause to this? Is it the motherboard, and if so couldnt I just buy a new motherboard of that model and plug it in?
OR! is there something manual I can do right now? Any help will just be swell.
(not a bad system though everything else works, its just the hdd problem)
EBAY #Item number: 180173514071
Replacing the motherboard in a laptop can be a BIG pain, and not cheap. Its possible the small plastic adapter that goes between the HDD and the controller pins has a bad or missing pin, or the adapter itself has a bent or broken pin. Its also possible one of the pins on the motherboard for the IDE connection has a bad solder joint, and might be able to be fixed but someone skilled at soldering small parts.
Other than that, there is no way really to “fix” a bad controller on a motherboard, just replacing the motherboard.
One option (to make it useable at least), is to get a LiveCD version of a Linux Distribution (Like Ubuntu), and just run it from CD. It will be slow, and you won’t be able to save anything you do, but you’ll be able to make some use of it.
There is also something called UBCD4Windows, which will make a bootable Windows XP CD, same deal, you can’t save anything.
Hope that helps.
Jason
http://www.onestoptechnologyshop.com
techsupport@onestoptechnologyshop.com
15 years in computer service and sales.
Giger Fine