CF,
Im having a hell of a time here. I have an HP laptop that came stock with vista. a few months ago I was going to throw a hitachi travelstar 500GB HDD in it so I used XXclone to make a bootable clone. I got side tracked and never installed it. Well yesterday I go to boot the machine and all I get is a flashing cursor after it posts. After trying a few things the last thing I did was run the HDD test in BIOS. It starts at 00% and before it ever moves, after about 15 seconds of scanning it tells me to replace the HDD. At this point i can care less. there was literally 10GB left on the drive so I opted to get the hitachi working.
Before doing anything I took out the HDD and threw it in an external case. I was able to navigate through it and see all my documents (like the 8 hours of homework I had to do for class tomorrow) and all my pictured. They were all still in tack so I was happy. I grabbed all the important stuff just to make sure I was covered.
So I grabbed the hitachi, threw it in and after it posts it says "NTLDR is missing, press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart. I specifically remember going through the process in XXclone to make it bootable. Now its got me thinking.
My boss gave me 2 extra keys for windows 7 ultimate. We ended up selling 2 machines he had planned on putting them in so he just gave them to me to "hold on to" and told me if I wanted to use one on one of my personal machines I could. I figured now was the time to take him up on it.
So I set the boot order to boot from DVD. Put the disk in and reboot. Nothing happens. All I get is the blank cursor (actually its an underscore). After trying a bunch of random stuff I pull the HDD out. It posts, restarts, posts, restarts, posts then finally boots into the windows DVD. As soon as I see it loading the windows files I throw the HDD back in.
So I get to the prompt, it asks me to accept that MS will own my soul, I say yes, go into fresh install (custom Install) then it asks me to pick which HDD to install on. I cant get ANY hdd drive to show up. I put the hitachi in, the stock one in, and old apple branded one in, nothing will show up. I refresh multiple times but it keeps saying there are no hdds installed.
I tried formating a drive to NTFS and still no luck. I opened disk mngr on another laptop with the HDD in an external case and there are no errors. Clean partitions with nothing on it.
What am I missing. Why is this HP giving me so many problems install MS? any help would be great. Thanks.
Im having a hell of a time here. I have an HP laptop that came stock with vista. a few months ago I was going to throw a hitachi travelstar 500GB HDD in it so I used XXclone to make a bootable clone. I got side tracked and never installed it. Well yesterday I go to boot the machine and all I get is a flashing cursor after it posts. After trying a few things the last thing I did was run the HDD test in BIOS. It starts at 00% and before it ever moves, after about 15 seconds of scanning it tells me to replace the HDD. At this point i can care less. there was literally 10GB left on the drive so I opted to get the hitachi working.
Before doing anything I took out the HDD and threw it in an external case. I was able to navigate through it and see all my documents (like the 8 hours of homework I had to do for class tomorrow) and all my pictured. They were all still in tack so I was happy. I grabbed all the important stuff just to make sure I was covered.
So I grabbed the hitachi, threw it in and after it posts it says "NTLDR is missing, press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart. I specifically remember going through the process in XXclone to make it bootable. Now its got me thinking.
My boss gave me 2 extra keys for windows 7 ultimate. We ended up selling 2 machines he had planned on putting them in so he just gave them to me to "hold on to" and told me if I wanted to use one on one of my personal machines I could. I figured now was the time to take him up on it.
So I set the boot order to boot from DVD. Put the disk in and reboot. Nothing happens. All I get is the blank cursor (actually its an underscore). After trying a bunch of random stuff I pull the HDD out. It posts, restarts, posts, restarts, posts then finally boots into the windows DVD. As soon as I see it loading the windows files I throw the HDD back in.
So I get to the prompt, it asks me to accept that MS will own my soul, I say yes, go into fresh install (custom Install) then it asks me to pick which HDD to install on. I cant get ANY hdd drive to show up. I put the hitachi in, the stock one in, and old apple branded one in, nothing will show up. I refresh multiple times but it keeps saying there are no hdds installed.
I tried formating a drive to NTFS and still no luck. I opened disk mngr on another laptop with the HDD in an external case and there are no errors. Clean partitions with nothing on it.
What am I missing. Why is this HP giving me so many problems install MS? any help would be great. Thanks.