[macfantn]

My girlfriend has an HP ZE4300 pavillion notebook and it isn't working. When I boot it up, it says operating system not found. I tried to boot up from the restore discs and start the restore it gets to 13% and says write fault and then shuts off. Anyone know anything about this or know where I can get info on it? Thanks in advance

[Doofy]

Sounds like the HD is wasted?

[RAILhead]

teh dead drive

[Atomic Rooster]

Why are you going out with a peecee user?

Do opposites really attract?

Put your mac beside her peecee and see what happens...

[ghporter]

RIP. GF needs a new laptop hard drive. They are more expensive than desktop drives, but in a well designed PC laptop it's not too hard to get at. This is part of why PC laptops aren't as sleek as iBooks or PowerBooks, which are harder to get at the drives in.

[Goldfinger]

Originally Posted by ghporter

RIP. GF needs a new laptop hard drive. They are more expensive than desktop drives, but in a well designed PC laptop it's not too hard to get at. This is part of why PC laptops aren't as sleek as iBooks or PowerBooks, which are harder to get at the drives in.

Not if you have an Alu PowerBook. So I've heard...

(I own a TiBook)

[ghporter]

What I hear is that the AlBooks are easier than TiBooks. It could be a matter of degree on the same level as "the Matterhorn is easier to climb than K2." I haven't tried it myself.

Many PC laptops are BUILT to let you actually swap the hard drive easily; my Dell has a carrier that takes ONE screw removal to release the thing and the whole hard drive and carrier slides right out. It makes manufacturing easier, too. But that Dell is NOT anywhere near as light and handy as either a PB or an iBook.

[tooki]

Oh dear, no. All iBooks, and the AlBooks, require massive disassembly. TiBooks had totally easy HD access. Only the Wallstreet, Lombard and Pismo had easier access, via the keyboard.

tooki

[macfantn]

Thanks for the news, although not what I was wanting. Anyone have any suggestions on where to buy a cheap HD, and if so what are the chances a mac user who knows nothing about pcs is able to install it and format it?

[ghporter]

Shop for a 2.5" IDE laptop drive. You should be able to search for a procedure to access the drive bay of your girlfirend's laptop. If you can do simple tasks with simple tools and have a bit of patience, the mechanical stuff is pretty straightforward (though you'll have to mess with SMALL bits).

Formatting the drive should be pretty simple. Those restore discs should note that the drive is blank and automatically begin an installation sequence-part of which is to partition and format the drive.

tooki, I had heard some people say that they didn't think the AlBooks were easier than TiBooks. Were they on drugs? I've looked at the procedures and I though it looked like building a ship in a bottle using mirors and duct tape, but not having tried it, I had to defer to "greater experience." Maybe it was the drugs...

[Athens]

Originally Posted by macfantn

My girlfriend has an HP ZE4300 pavillion notebook and it isn't working. When I boot it up, it says operating system not found. I tried to boot up from the restore discs and start the restore it gets to 13% and says write fault and then shuts off. Anyone know anything about this or know where I can get info on it? Thanks in advance

Hard Drive

[tooki]

I've done both. The TiBook is simple. You remove the back cover and the drive is right in front of you. iBooks and AlBooks are like 3D jigsaw puzzles involving about 40 Philips 00 and 000 screws, foil and kapton tape, all holding together several layers of components, all of which has to come out and go back in a specific order.

tooki

[ghporter]

Yeek! That's enough to give you nightmares! You must need magnifiers, an illustrated disassembly manual and about three yards of tape to hold the screws while they're out! No thanks! Not old thumb-fingered me!

[Athens]

Originally Posted by ghporter

Yeek! That's enough to give you nightmares! You must need magnifiers, an illustrated disassembly manual and about three yards of tape to hold the screws while they're out! No thanks! Not old thumb-fingered me!

Try gutting a compaq to get to a lose connector for the LCD, 3 months later im still trying to put it back together lol.

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Originally Posted by macfantn

My girlfriend has an HP ZE4300 pavillion notebook and it isn't working. When I boot it up, it says operating system not found. I tried to boot up from the restore discs and start the restore it gets to 13% and says write fault and then shuts off. Anyone know anything about this or know where I can get info on it? Thanks in advance

Both errors mean the disk can't be accessed- but not nessisarily that the disk itself is ruined. (Though that is indeed possible, even probable).

Just last week a friend's laptop hard drive seemed to crap out in a similar way. Luckily, before he went and got a new drive, I checked the machine out for him. The problem was a $5 IDE cable connecting the drive to the mobo.

If you can, check the drive using an external 2.5 hard drive enclosure, or have someone check it out for you. If the drive mounts on anything else, it's some combination of laptop hardware at fault, not the drive. If not, it is indeed hosed.

[bstone]

Originally Posted by tooki

Oh dear, no. All iBooks, and the AlBooks, require massive disassembly. TiBooks had totally easy HD access. Only the Wallstreet, Lombard and Pismo had easier access, via the keyboard.

tooki

Oh how I love my Pismo with a 7200rpm 8mb buffer 60gb HD (ATA-6).

Totally silent, super fast and large!

[iNub]

I agree. It's either the hard drive or the cable connecting to it. Depending on the laptop model, that cable can be very hard to find, though.

As a previous owner of an original white iBook (RIP), I can testify that swapping the hard drive on that thing was insanely difficult, and to this day, 18 months after the final disassembly to part it out from a power spike, I'm still finding those tiny goddamn screws all over the place.

[Paco500]

Wow- what a collection of "Mr. Worst Case Scenarios."

The disk may be fine- just has corruption. Hopefully you can use the restore disk to get to the repair console and run chkdisk /r? I think that's the command. Many a HD has been completely recoverable this way.

The fact that it's getting to 13% tells me that you may be fine. As you have started to run the rebuild, your data may be gone, but not necessarily.

Don't give up hope until you try the BASICS.

[iNub]

Come to think of it, you may have a bad installation CD. Check it for scratches or smudges.

Having gone through several dozen Windows installations on just about every configuration imaginable, I know that one thing Microsoft does right is installers. The rest of their software might be shaky, but they make some robust installers. If the installer CD throws up an error, as indecipherable as it may be, it's usually a hardware issue.

I may have made an error in judgement by thinking that you were trying to do a clean installation. A clean Windows installation is done on an empty, freshly formatted disk. If you're trying to install on a hard drive with a corrupted file system, like Paco500 suggests, you could get an I/O error from that too. But, the likelihood of that is small, considering that the Windows installer actually does a disk scan before writing anything. You may be in the minority that actually does have a corrupted NTFS disk.

Use one of these to try and mount the drive on your destkop. I have that exact one and it works fine, even if it is a bit flimsy. You're not offroading with a hard drive anyways, I would hope.

If my reply seems a bit erratic, that's because it's way past my bed time. Good luck.