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Dell Inspiron 1501 - HDD not showing in BIOS

Tags:
  • Dell Inspiron
  • BIOS
  • Storage
  • Hard Drives
October 8, 2014 11:19:41 AM

Hi

I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop. AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-58 1.90Ghz.. Samsung HM160HI hdd. Bios is Phoenix 2.6.3 - the most recent available, I think.

Bought it 2nd hand off ebay August 2013. It came with XP. Upgraded to Vista Home Basic 64 bit in May. I've found it a good laptop to use, but the hard drive is starting to fill, and Speccy gives it a 'warning' status, so I plan to change it before the year is out.

Recently, a relative gave me a BT digital tv/dvr box. I had no use for the thing itself, but could see a 2.5" hard drive inside. So, I opened it up and found a Western Digital WD AV-25 500GB SATA model no WD5000LUCT.

I connected it externally. It didn't show up under 'computer', and though it was visible in 'disk management', right-clicking saw that all possibilities were greyed out. The Disk showed as having three main partitions - aprox 400GB, 40Gb and 20GB - and some smaller ones.

After Googling I came across several recommendations for Partition Wizard, which I downloaded, and which could access the drive. What finally made it accessible in Disk Management was changing the Partition Type ID which had seemed to be set on something relating to Linux (I didn't note the exact one, perhaps unfortunately), and which I changed to 0x07 NTFS. Using Disk Management I Formatted the three main partitions to NTFS and deleted the rest (one of 4GB, another two about 100MB each) planning to expand the 20GB partition into the space.

I took my old drive out, put the new one in, the OS disc in the DVD drive and started up. Vista couldn't find any HD to install on, suggesting I may want to load drivers that may enable a drive to be found. I restarted and went to BIOS, to find 'none' listed for HDD. I put my old drive back in, booting up fine.

Further Googling brought up the possibility of a confusion over the drive/BIOS conflicting or confusion over AHCI/SATA/IDE settings, and suggested changing them in BIOS, but unfortunately there's no option in my BIOS for such a change to test the idea.

To see if it would help, I used Partition Wizard to copy my old HD to the new, but the WD is still not showing up. It works fine as an external drive, and if nothing else I can certainly use it for that, but if anyone has any ideas as to what might make it show up - or what might be stopping it from doing so - I'd be very grateful.

If not, any tips/recommendations as to larger (300GB+) drives that the 1501 will work fine with that I can look out for, as I'm now wary of buying one that has the same issue as the AV-25.

Thanks!

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