Dead motherboard?

[Bigbear3]

I have an old sony vaio laptop pcg-fxa48. One day it just froze. The mouse would move but nothing would happen. I shut it down by holding the power button. When I tried to reboot it said operating system not found. When i inserted the reinstallation disks it said hard drive not found. I took out the hard drive out and replaced it with one from another sony vaio laptop. This hard drive had the operating system installed on it already. It did the exact same thing. No hard drive found. I put it back into the other computer and it worked there. I've tried many different bios setting, and still no difference.

Is there anything thing else it could be or it it just a dead/dieing motherboard.

Thanks,
Nick

 

[house70]

Try inserting a new HDD and enter the BIOS. If it is recognized in BIOS, it should work.
The same process should apply to the old HDD, see if it recognized in BIOS.

 

[saint19]

Hi Bigbear3 and welcome to Tom's forum.

If you have an IDE-SATA converter, use it to connect the laptop HD to a desktop PC. If you can see the HD, this works fine.

Why the other drive doesn't work? Unless that both laptop be the same model, the HD change that you did, in the mode that you did it will never work, laptops and desktop use different drivers and that change with the model.