New laptop hard drive cranky.

I am servicing an HP dv2125nr notebook computer. The problem was that it came up with a blue screen while booting and said, "unmountable_boot_volume."

I took the drive out and mounted it in my desktop pc via the on board SATA controller. I booted to my system and ran a chkdsk and an anti-virus scan on the notebook drive. It found some problems and fixed them. I put the drive back in the notebook and it started working again. So far so good.

I put the drive back in the desktop pc and made an image backup to my internal IDE drive. Still, so far so good.

I bought a new Fujitsu hard drive off of ebay, received it, and mounted it in my desktop pc thinking I could restore the image file from hard disk to the new Fujitsu drive. However when I powered up the pc, the pc speaker beeped once as it always does after posting, then it froze at the screen where it displays the components attached to the IDE and SATA controllers. After a few seconds, the screen went blank and the system rebooted again. It stayed in this loop until I had to manually remove the power. I was unable to get into the bios settings. If I remove the new drive, of course everything is fine again.

I called Fujitsu and told them the story and they said it could be a firmware problem where it was only designed to operate in certain systems. That was news to me. I never heard of a new, empty hard drive being designed to only operate in specific systems.

Have any of you encountered a problem like this before? I doubt the hard drive is defective but on the other hand, I can't think of any other reasonable explanation.

By the way, if I put the new drive in the notebook and try to boot with a utility cd, the same thing happens. It freezes on the HP logo though it doesn't constantly reboot.

Thanks for your reply.

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David Farber
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David Farber
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What happens if the blank SATA drive is the only drive in your desktop system? Can you at least get to the BIOS then?

Sylvia.

Reply to
Sylvia Else

I've seen occasional weirdness, somewhat like this, when attempting to install a new SATA-2 hard drive in a system with a SATA-1 host interface. There appear to be some cases in which the drive and the host controller fail to correctly negotiate their way down to the SATA-1 signalling rate, and the PHYs tend to hang up.

In cases lile this, it may be possible to put the hard drive into a newer PC with a SATA-2 interface, and then use a vendor-specific utility to configure the drive for SATA-1 operation.

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Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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Dave Platt

Hi Sylvia,

Same thing happens when the SATA drive is the only drive in the desktop pc. Keeps rebooting and cannot enter into the BIOS.

Thanks for your reply.

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David Farber
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David Farber

I found the specification sheet for the new hard drive here:

formatting link

It says the transfer rate 150MB/sec which is the SATA-1 protocol, no?

The HP notebook specification sheet is here:

formatting link
for your reply.--David FarberDavid Farber's Service CenterL.A., CA

Reply to
David Farber

Original trimmed:

I have a G60-127NR which is simular to yours and during a service issue session I learned that they don't support all SATA formats for these machines.

Here is the list they gave me for mine.

The notebooks support the following 9.5mm (2.5-inch) Serial ATA hard drives:

120GB (5400 rpm)

160GB (5400 rpm)

200GB (5400 rpm)

250GB (5400 rpm)

320GB (5400 rpm)

You will notice that the list f sizes is specific and no 7200rpm drive is supported from this list. So if you bought a 7200 or size that is not in this list it may be the problem.

It would have been nice of them to tell us in advance right?

If it is not the problem, you probably have a motherboard problem that is common in the invidia bastards bad chipsets.

Mine was tossing this kind of errors to start with (windows encountered an unknown error and caint continue at boot)(I bought a refurb) and had to be sent back to HP for service under warranty. They changed the memory, motherboard, cpu, hard drive, and heatsink assembly all out in it.

Sadly the left the DVD drive which had tracking problem in it. This was how I learned about the supported drives list.

Gnack

Reply to
Gnack Nol

David Farber Inscribed thus:

Sounds like bull. One reason I won't touch a Fujitsu drive.

I've had the same rubbish spouted at me by Fujitsu in order to avoid admitting their product is faulty.

The drive is faulty ! Send it back...

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Best Regards:
                Baron.
Reply to
baron

I think I see the problem!

Reply to
PeterD

Insert bootable Windows CD enter recovery console and type chkdsk /r

Don't know what your operating system is but the above is for XP. Vista and 7 may have the same feature but I have not needed to recover an unmountable boot volume in either. However I just did a Compaq laptop and successfully recover the operating system. Chkdsk /r can take a couple hours since it does an exhaustive search for and recovers data from bad sectors using NTFS's journal. And it does it while there is no disk acceleration drivers loaded.

Reply to
Meat Plow

The replacement drive is a SATA, 160GB, 5400rpm drive. That is on your list.

Thanks for your reply.

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David Farber
David Farber's Service Center
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Reply to
David Farber

It certainly looks that way.

Thanks for your reply.

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David Farber
David Farber's Service Center
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Reply to
David Farber

The original drive is working ok now. I'm using XP. But it's over five years old and I'd rather replace it now before it crashes for good.

Thanks for your reply.

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David Farber
David Farber's Service Center
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Reply to
David Farber

No problem. The Unmountable Boot Volume Stop Error can also be caused by the laptop hardware drivers. Compaq has documented this and has a service pack. There may or may not be a real problem with the drive considering HP and Compaq the same company.

Reply to
Meat Plow

The seller agreed to exchange the Fujitsu with a Samsung drive. The Samsung drive worked without a hitch. Problem solved.

Thanks for your reply.

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David Farber
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Reply to
David Farber

Back several years ago I refused to accept new Dell Power Edge servers with Fujitsu SCSI drives. I was back and forth to two sited I ordered brand new servers for only to have drives fail in both in little more than a week. I spent many hours I couldn't bill for changing them out to Seagate drives.

Reply to
Meat Plow

Meat Plow Inscribed thus:

Fujitsu are crap drives, crap service. Avoid !

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Best Regards:
                     Baron.
Reply to
Baron

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