[RESOLVED] Dell Lat. C600 Laptop hardware problem?

[jmtjet]

I picked up a Dell Latitude C600 laptop for very little money. Now I'm trying to get it going. here's what I'm seeing; when I got the unit I knew the hard drive was bad, so the first step was to replace the drive with a 60 GB hitachi drive. When I try a boot with a Linux live CD, or a Win 2K disk in the CD drive I get: message 1: secondary hard drive 0 not found followed by:message 2: No boot sector on hard drive. Followed by two beeps. The BIOS are Phoenix Tech. version A09. No matter how I set the boot sequence I still get the same messages. So I thought the CD drive was bad, so I replaced it with a new one, but still get the same messages followed by two beeps. I've check the Phoenix beep code and can't find what two beeps mean. The BIOS sees the new hard drive and records it as 60GB. Also, there's no way to reset the BIOS to the default setting. Any ideas on this mystery? Thanks.

[Steve R Jones]

Are there jumper pins on the hard drive?

[SuperSparks]

I seem to recall, and I may stand to be corrected here, that there were some early models of laptops that were not capable of being booted from the optical drive. The OS was factory installed onto the hard disk as an image. Are there definitely no BIOS options for booting from CDROM?

[Steve R Jones]

I have three of these in my office...And they are new enough to have boot from cd option and they come with a Full cd of XP.

[jmtjet]

Thanks for the replies. I forgot to mention there's no floppy drive on this unit, and yes, there's the option to change the boot sequence in the BIOS. I've tried all setting I can think of, but get the same messages. As far as jumpers(pulling the drive ) yes, there is instructions for jumpering the drive on the back. Now, I got to figure out what's what. The drive is an Hitachi, Model: HTS541260H9AT00, 60 GB ata/ide.

[jmtjet]

Conclusion: I purchased a new hard drive and CD-ROM drive for the unit. But was still unable to format the new drive through the Dell laptop. I hooked up the new drive to my desktop PC using an USB adapter I have and formatted that way. After formatting I reinstalled the drive in the laptop and was able to install Ubuntu Linux on it. I'm still having issues with the wireless internet adapted card, but that's a Linux issue and will be worked out. The unit is running well with Ubuntu. Thanks to all for your help.

[SuperSparks]

Very strange

I'm glad you got it working in the end

[jmtjet]

Very strange

In another forum I go to a mod there told me it might be the motherboard battery causing it to not recognize the CD-ROM drive. But after I formatted to FAT32 and put the drive back in the lappy it recognized the live CD and booted. It took me a three tries to install Ubuntu, but in the end I got'er done.

A year or two ago I bought a Vantec ide/sata to usb adapter. I've used it several times since. It really comes in handy