laptop wont boot with original drive

[ljtechservices]

This is an odd one that i've seen 3 times that I can remember. I wonder if anyone else has experienced it. I think it's been covered before and I've commented on it but I can't seem to find the postings.

I get a laptop that wont boot. It won't even boot to a CD/DVD or USB stick. It posts fine and ID's the hardware including the HDD. The HDD passes the builtin drive utilities as well. I pull the drive check it out on my bench system and it looks fine. No SMART errors, no bad clusters, Passes diags. (Even a PCX style diag.) As far as I could tell there is no boot sector virus. MBR is clean, etc.

So I go ahead and image the drive to a new one, put it in the laptop and it boots fine, everything great.

Put the old drive in no boot.

The first 2 times this happened they were Dell studio's with Vista installed.
I just chalked it up to there being some Vista/Dell voodoo boot malfunction.

I've actually used these "failed" drives as test bed drives in other laptops with no problem.

Today I get an HP Probook 4530 with Windows 7 home that does the same thing.
It wouldn't boot from anything till I pulled the HDD.

Any ideas?

 

[NYJimbo]

Put the old drive in and use something like Easus partition master/manager bootable CD or UBCD4win with similar tool to see if there is a partition set as active/boot.

Cloning might be doing that for you. I know I have seen some systems just sit there brain dead if there is no partition set as boot/active while other systems will warn you or produce some kind of error.

Sometimes this will happen to a drive after a virus infection.

 

[ljtechservices]

Partition was set to active.
After cloning to the new drive I put the old in another laptop and it starts to boot to the OS just fine.

 

[FremontPC]

Can't say I've run across this one myself, but I'd be looking for a firmware issue in the drive that doesn't get along with the chipset/chipset drivers? BIOS issue?

Might be interesting to clone the drive that works back to the one that doesn't.

 

[ljtechservices]

Can't say I've run across this one myself, but I'd be looking for a firmware issue in the drive that doesn't get along with the chipset/chipset drivers? BIOS issue?

Might be interesting to clone the drive that works back to the one that doesn't.

that's one thing I haven't tried.
I'll try it with this one.

 

[CLC]

You probably tried but did you set the option in The bios to IDE or Compatible mode?

 

[ljtechservices]

Okay maybe a breakthrough on this one.

According to fdisk on a linux boot cd, partition 1 is misreporting it's size. This is the small windows 7 system partition.
I discovered this while trying to set the active partition again.

however IIRC I didn't have that problem with the prior vista PC's so this instance may be unrelated.

 

[trevm999]

Whenever I have a drive that doesn't work quite right in one machine, but tests fine and works in others, and a new drive in the machine works fine, I will zero out the hard drive. Usually that has solved the issues I have experienced.

 

[nlinecomputers]

that's one thing I haven't tried.
I'll try it with this one.

Dban the drive first and write zeros to all sectors. Might just have something weird on it that this bios objects too.

 

[Markverhyden]

Dban the drive first and write zeros to all sectors. Might just have something weird on it that this bios objects too.

I've done similar. Mount the drive in a *nix box, wipe the partitions, add a *nix partition. Then put it back on the windows box. The OS install forces a new partition then re-installed windows.