new HDD for gateway computer

[Soundguy]

My broter brought me his gateway computer that was not working. he had just moved and had not had it on in 3mos. Said it had hdd failure on bootup when he hooke dit up. unit is a couple years old maybee.. pentium 4.. etc.. I thought maybee it had just had a low cmos battery and lost hdd params and needed to autodetect.

nope.. turne dthe post codes on, and computer is saying it is a media failure. the small hdd tester in the bios also says it is a media failure. HDD also does not sound like it spins up correctly.. sounds like it continously auto-parks.. etc.. I'm guessing it is toast. it was a wd .. which I've had good luck with that brand.. but i guess there is always 1 or 2 that are bad.

I did try swapping the cable ( 80 pin ).. and also swapping to the other channel onthe controller and telling it to boot there. no change.

Now.. here's the question... that system has a recovery cd, and there is a bios option to boot from the atapi cdrom.. etc... Is this going to be as simple as hitting walmart.. throwing in another hdd, setting it up in bios, and letting the hdd program format it, and then rebooting with the cdrom recovery disc ? and will it then reinstall the software as it was purchased.. including the operating system? Any idea if i'm that lucky.. or will the OS be the issue...

soundguy

 

[SnowRidge]

I'm pretty sure it will set it back to day one. I'm not positive that it doesn't need to find a trace of the old OS. Microsoft has been real nasty about giving any buyer of a system with Winders preinstalled any chance of installing the OS on another machine.

Let us know. I, for one, am curious.

 

[Soundguy]

Gateway is tight lipped as well. Since the unit is out of warranty, -any- service telephone call on it is 35$ and up.. even to just get that answer from them. I'd hate for my brother to go buy a new HDD and slap it in, and it still not work... and buying a new copy of windoes will be almsot as much as a box store computer, once you add in the hdd price.

Anyone here got a gateway and know if it will completely restore off cdrom restore disc to a virgin hdd?

Soundguy

 

[jdbower]

Even if it doesn't work, the new HDD can be slapped into an external case and hooked up to the new computer for backup purposes. In most cases the system restore disks don't need the *exact* OEM hardware configuration, but I can't speak for Gateway in particular.

 

[jwstewar]

It has been awhile since I've restored a Gateway (who buys Gateway now days), but the last time I did it was just like all of the other boxed computers and you could put the new hdd in and it would restore from CD or DVD. If you only have a CD and there is only one, you may be screwed because the actual software may have been on a hidden partition on the old hard drive. If it is DVD or multiple CDs you are probably OK.

 

[Soundguy]

I may be in luck here.. I dug thru the small cd-booklet that came with his gateway.. most of the disc are genericaly labeled.. but one says 'OS reinstall cd' on a little fine print on the clear 'hub' of the cd.. otherwise disc is blue with just a gateway part number on it.... i think i hit paydirt!
And yes.. there were about 5 discs of 'extra' drivers and applications.

soundguy

thanks for the ideas.

 

[MossRoad]

Once you get that thing up and running on the new hard drive and you have time to fiddle with attempting to recover data from the old drive, try this.

Put the old drive in the freezer for an hour or so.
Openthe CP case and remove the CD drive data and power cables.
Install the frozen hard drive using the CD drive data and power cables.
Boot up and see if it detects the old hard drive as it comes up.
If it does, when windows launches, see if you can then see it. If so, immediately copy all of the data off the old drive into a folder on the new drive.
If not, nothing lost but a few minutes of time.

We've had limitted success with this method. Just remember this... if the frozen drive does come up and work, don't shut the PC down for long. It usually only works a couple times to freeze it. After that, not much luck.

 

[Soundguy]

I poppe dinto walmart this am and grabbed the smallest drive they had.. a 160gb.. and have it in the system being formatted by the gateway OS /reinstall cd as we speak.

only 1 hitch so far. The gateway software makes no mention of being service pack one and has a date of 2002.. so I'm not counting on sp1.. since that is the case.. drive is limited to 137mb and is using a drive overlay.. that was a little bit to finagle around to get the gateway cd to startup.. but i managed after trying about 3 times and finally finding the right screen to enter to allow it to boot from the CD AFTER the drive overlay laoded.. etc.

Once i get it all back up and his pre-loaded software installed.. i'll investigate the old hdd. At this point it won't even spin up.. so i think it may be 100% kaput??

thanks for help so far and i will post back.

Also.. no pressure but my bro just calle dme this am and asked if his computer was ready as he needs it to take a college test online next week, and needs to study some DOH!

Soundguy

 

[Amontilado]

Soundguy,

Another item to watch out for, that I ran into redoing an IBM with Windows 2000, is the restore disc only retoring the disk to its original size. THis computer came with a 15gig, which I replaced with an 80gig. After restoring, I had 15gig available, with the rest wasted . I wanted one partition, so I had use another WIn200 disk to see the entire disk.

Steve

 

[crbr]

NTSF will resolve that.