Compaq Harddrive

have a 15 gig toshiba drive removed from a compaq upgrade
trying to install this drive into a dell latitude message appears at bootup of dell saying drive is protected by a password authentication system .

my cmos is set to boot from floppy dell just hangs on the message above.unable to access floppy or cdrom

this drive is fine in a desktop pc able to perform fdisk,format etc, tried other drives in the dell the message does not appear

must have something to do with being from a compaq.

Any solutions


Thanks Hermankamp

Do a "LOW LEVEL FORMAT" first, then fdisk, then format, and I bet that it will work without any probs.

Compaq laptops sometimes have a very small area of hard drive to store some BIOS related stuff, along with the installation BOM number for their "Quickrestore" CDs to verify from. It is a protected area of drive, so a low level format should free it up for you.

Hope this works for you.

Rudders

Ive searched for a low level format utility for this drive its made by toshiba do you know where i can find this.

Id hate to ruin the drive .

Before you do anything else, check to make sure the Dell laptop did not have some sort of authentication system attached..a lot of business machines do now, and that info is not stored on the hard drive, but in the machine..if that is the case, you may have a problem. The other possibility is your bios version..this is from dell

"BIOS revision A04 on the Latitude CP adds a Disk Password feature to System Setup. A Disk Password protected hard drive will give the following error message when the hard drive is moved to a Latitude CP with a BIOS version that was released prior to A04: Primary hard disk drive 0 failure"

Hi Geoscomp

I thought about that as well already checked with dell nothing in cmos stoppnig me from installing drive.

I've also installed into the same laptop a 4.8g works fine 3.2g and a 1 gig also work fine only receive this error with the drive coming from that @%$#&*@ Compaq.

Thanks
HermanKamp

Well, if your Compaq Laptop was made before June 1999, then my solution above should fix it.

You might be advised to try booting from a floppy into DOS to run a DOS based low level formatter to be sure of success.
DOS formatting progs are also faster IMHO

Rudders