By arfore | Published: June 8, 2008
This is part one of a short series of articles detailing the process I went through to restore a friend’s table pc after her hard drive dies due to a head crash.
Background
My friend has a Gateway CX210X Convertible Notebook. This model uses a SATA internal drive. Her drive died sometime last Friday afternoon while working in Windows. You got the standard click of the drive arm against the platter that wouldn’t stop.
I tried some basic restoration techniques to see if I could at least see the drive:
Nothing worked. So I went out and bought a new hard drive for her from one of the local computer places in Valdosta, Belson’s pcXchange.
Installation Problems
At this point I thought I was going to be homefree, boy was I wrong. The first hurdle was getting the Windows install cd to even see the hard drive. Apparently the bios for the CX210X does not have a legacy option to allow the SATA controller to be seen as a standard IDE controller. No problem, I can just use a USB floppy drive to load the drivers before the install, right? Wrong.
According to Microsoft there are only three USB floppy drives that are supported in the Windows XP installation process. While the one I had was a Sony drive, it was not the right model. When using the F6 installer option the drive was read, but later in the installation process when it needed it the second time the drive was not seen. At work we had run into this problem when installing Windows Server 2003 on a Sun x86-based server. The way around it for us was to used the ILOM port and install the OS remotely. This was not an option in the restoration of this machine.
Slipstream to the rescue
After reading a lot on Google, it turns out the best solution for this was to get the driver from Gateway’s support site and adding it to the installation cd.
While I have done this with a service pack before, I had never added in drivers, but I doubted that it would be that difficult.
I found a site or two that discussed adding the drivers into the cd by hand using Microsoft’s sysprep process, but there was a better solution. The guys over at nLite have put together a great piece of software that made the whole process like butter. It makes adding patches, drivers and hotfixes a breeze, and you can even use it to create an ISO to burn and boot.
Installation Time
Time to let her rip! So the installation process worked out just great. The installer recognized the drive and after installation I had network right off the bat.
What’s next?
The next step will be to get all the updates and see about the Tablet hardware.
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