Putting a new hard drive in a Gateway Laptop

[JLuchinski]

So I bought a new Seagate hard drive for my laptop, went to install XP on it and ended up getting a stop error which ended up being something about the hard disk controller not working properly. The original hard drive was a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, should I exchange the Seagate for a Western Digital? Or is there something else that I'm missing here?

 

[JLuchinski]

Hmmm, replaced with the same hard drive and the same thing. Is it possible that there is a boot sector virus?

 

[johnb35]

Nope, not the reason. Look in the bios to see if you can change the sata controller from ahci/raid to IDE/compatibility. Most if not all laptops are running ahci mode. Windows XP doesn't have native ahci support so you would have to slipstream the sata controller driver into a new install cd if you can't change the controller from ahci to IDE.

 

[JLuchinski]

I can change it to ide but then it doesn't find the hard drive. Does it matter if it's a 32 bit os?

 

[johnb35]

If you change it to IDE, it should find the hard drive with no issues. You were getting the stop error because of it being in ahci mode. Why are you putting a new hard drive in it anyway? Maybe its possible the controller is bad.

 

[JLuchinski]

We want to keep the data on the old drive. I put the old drive back in and it still boots up.

 

[johnb35]

If you change it to ide and insert the old drive, it won't boot because the drivers are set for ahci. It should find the new blank drive just fine on IDE.

 

[JLuchinski]

Alright, I got it going, thanks a ton John.

 

[JLuchinski]

Ok, now it's shutting off during installation with or without the battery in it.

 

[johnb35]

Errors on the hard drive will cause that.

 

[JLuchinski]

Actually I propped the laptop up and it worked fine, was overheating (face palm).