New HDD not working

[blanco]

Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 Laptop HDD Upgrade not working.

Installed a NEW Toshiba SATA 250GB HDD. Fully formatted, installed Win XP Pro and OEM Audio/Video/Printer drivers.
Will not boot in Normal mode and runs extremely slowly and intermittently in Safe mode. The disk activity LED freezes for
long periods and it takes an age to respond to any user input, making it useless. If I refit the original 120GB HDD all works
normally. No BIOS changes made. The operating system and other software loaded on both drives are identical.
I had not expected any compatibility problem but it appears there is such an issue. What am I overlooking? Has any other
of you guys had such an issue and what is the remedy? Do I have to make Bios/Chipset alterations?
I would be very grateful for any suggestions or information. Thanks.

[jareemon]

sounds like a faulty drive

[gary67]

How did you copy the drive did you clone it, re reading your post you did a clean install to the new drive?

[blanco]

It does seem that way but I'm not sure. The drive was delivered in an unopened factory
antistatic foil pack and I handled it with extreme care. I realise that new mass produced
products will have a low percentage failure rate but is this one of them? Hoping for other
suggestions. Does Bios need update to enable the larger capacity HDD? Not getting any
response from Fujitsu Help or their forum.

[blanco]

Yes, Gary. This was a clean install using the same XP Pro installation disc that was used
for the original setup.

[Speedy Gonzales]

Does the BIOS recognise this hdd? By the sounds of it, it does, if you installed windows on it. If you know where the BIOS update is, I would check and see what version is on the laptop now and what the latest version is. And see what it fixes. Hmm could be because there's no service packs on the system (if you didn't slipstream any service packs)?

[blanco]

Speedy, The Bios shows the new HDD correctly and "Mode 5" which can be altered but not knowing what that means I haven't touched it. The Fujitsu d/l site shows a few flash Bios updates from the original 1.06 through 1.08, 1.10 up to 1.14 but there is no mention of larger capacity HDDs in the update attributes.

[Speedy Gonzales]

No harm in updating the BIOS then (if you can that is). See what happens. Dont forget to reset it back to the default settings, then reconfigure the settings / save settings after. Does it show the full size of the hdd in the BIOS??

If it doesn't boot normally, what does it do?? Show any errors / crash?

[blanco]

I've just noticed that the "mode 5" thing is not shown in Bios with the original HDD installed - only if I boot with the new one, so I'm wondering if I need to alter it. What
is it? If I boot in normal mode with the new HDD it just fails to boot, no errors are displayed. It does boot in safe mode but runs too slowly & intermittently to be of any use. I want to get past this "Mode 5" thing before Bios flashing which may not be needed.

[Speedy Gonzales]

Dont worry about the mode, it means DMA mode 5...Thats what BIOS'es detect hdds as. Was the old hdd SATA 1 or 2 and is the new one SATA 1 or 2?