Gateway MT3712b laptop

Help!! I have a 2nd user Gateway MT3712b (W340UA) laptop that won't
recognise the hard drive (I've tried 2). I renewed the button cell on
the motherboard as someone had removed it? Now I can boot into bios, and
by changing the boot sequence I can boot from usb floppy and usb cd-rom
but no hard drive listed?
I have a utility cd that should be able to reformat the hard drive but
that can't see it either.
Do I need to flash the bios, as I believe that can be a nightmare if it
goes wrong!!
Any help would be much appreciated.

Peter Heel wrote:
Help!! I have a 2nd user Gateway MT3712b (W340UA) laptop that won't
recognise the hard drive (I've tried 2). I renewed the button cell on
the motherboard as someone had removed it? Now I can boot into bios, and
by changing the boot sequence I can boot from usb floppy and usb cd-rom
but no hard drive listed?
I have a utility cd that should be able to reformat the hard drive but
that can't see it either.
Do I need to flash the bios, as I believe that can be a nightmare if it
goes wrong!!
Any help would be much appreciated.


Peter,

There are two possibilities he

1. Faulty hardware, either TWO defective hard drives or a failed
motherboard controller.

2. No connection at all between hard drive and laptop motherboard.

I am not familiar with that model, but many laptops require some sort of
adapter (sometimes called an interposer) for the hard drive. The
adapter fits over the pins on a 44-pin PATA laptop drive, and slides
into a mating socket inside the laptop chassis.

If you still have the original drive, take a look at it to see if it has
an adapter on it... Ben Myers

Thanks for replying Ben, no the drive doesn't need an adaptor. When I
bought the machine the original 120 gig drive had been removed, (data
protection and all that) and a 60 gig bunged in which the bios couldn't
see. I noticed that the 60 gig drive was only 4200 revs where as it
should have been 5400 revs. So i had a couple of 5400 rev drives from
other machines that I know are good, but no joy. I can't see how the
wrong speed drive could damage anything could it? I'm okay with desktops
but pretty new to laptops, but I've been confident and capable enough to
strip it down as the bios wouldn't hold any changes. The problem was the
button cell had been removed (alarm bells). But a new battery and
rebuilding it seems to have got it working except for this hard drive
problem. The drive light flashes for about 6 seconds then the 'No
operating system found' message. The machine is only about 18 months
old, intel duo core.