HP Pavillion dv9000 laptop/AMD CPU/XP Home/Seagate SATA HD 120GB
Briefly: At boot, console message "no operating system" appears, and boot fails.
History: Seagate SATA Momentum 5400 HD was removed to send laptop back for case hinge failure. That drive was partitioned by OEM into C: (containing the OS and applications) and D: (the HP Recovery partition). When purchased in 2007, a complete set of 18 (Yes! 18) recovery disks was created. When computer returned, the HD was re-installed, and the "no operating system" failure was observed.
At this point, I decided to replace the HD with a new Seagate 5400 300 GB HD, and deciced to "test" with a RedHat Linux install...Linux reported "No HD, install 3rd-party drivers". At this point, I tried an install of Windoze XP Pro SP2. The install went well (partitioning and formatting with NTFS was OK) until the re-boot...at which time the HD was again "missing".
I DL'd BIOS updates from HP (replacing D.41 with D.43), re-installed XP Pro with same failure result...during my attempts, I discovered that if I left the CD in the CD drive, but ignored the "press any key to boot from CD" during the restart, the install completed and I could access the HD. I could delete/write files, examine the Disk management, etc...but upon a re-boot (hot or cold) the HD was gone again.
I then replaced with the original HD (120GB), put the first HP recovery disk in the CD drive, and selected the third option (quit"...neither (1: repairing) nor (2:restoring)...and the boot continued, with all the original HD content there.
I suspect that during POST, the internal HD is not being "populated" to the device-list, but I can't see the console output, as the HP splash-screen obscures it. OTOH, although there is no mention in the BIOS screen of a "RAID-AHCI" vs: "emulate ATA" mode selection, if somehow the SATA controller was in AHCI, the HD would seem to be missing-unmounted as well.
The bios offers the following Boot options in any order: (1) CD; (2) HardDrive[internal]; (3)USB HardDrive; (4) USB Floppy; (5)USB Key. I also tried physically removing the original HD from the case, and using a SATA-to-USB dongle, booting from the (300 GB drive) USB Hard Drive Option which contained XP Pro. The boot proceeded until the Windoze screen and terminated with a BSOD, error 0000 007B. Same occurred when I put the OS on a thumb drive. Trying with the original 120GB drive with the Mfgr's XP Home OS failed with a message saying (in effect) "booting from replaceable HDs is not supported.
Last thought: regardless of which HD is installed, the BIOS Boot Order screen does NOT list the internal Hard Drive among the selections...only the CD...which reinforces my suspicion that the BIOS does not recognize the internal HardDrive...BUT why can I access it if I first load an install disk into the CD reader, reboot and ignore "boot from cd"?
Can anyone suggest how I can disable the HP splash screen, so I can see console output during POST?
Does anyone know if AHCI is EVEN an option in the BIOS?
Any advice would be appreciated...Thanx
JTE
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