CAN WE MAKE THIS A STICKY...! ( edit by all means...lol )
After searching this forum for a solution I was getting so many confusing answers, especially about replacing a hard drive... will it accept SATA II, largest size etc, configuring jumpers. Some say they have 250GB, 500GB but no answer to posters how to get laptop to recognise new hard drive.
Friends laptop had an 80GB that failed after a powercut, they bought a 500GB Western Digital Blue ( which is SATA II ) and I was stuck at the issue laptop doesn't recognise hard drive in bios and XP Home SP3 slipstreamed didn't recognise it. Searching the internet I was thinking maybe 500GB and Sata II was the issue so bought a 120GB Sata I... no go, same issue. Some were saying the brand of hard drive was making a difference so ebayed for exact model that failed. This still didn't work.
By mistake I put a windows 7 installation disk in and voila... Hard drive recognised by installation so I was thinking it was a sata driver issue.
I then created a XP Home SP3 slipstreamed with the SATA / RAID drivers and installation found the hard drive... Yippeeeeeeeee. Cant see anywhere that Sata hard drive is detected anywhere in Bios ( has latest )...lol
I havent had this issue before with Sata hard drives and XP installations.
So to help all those replacing a hard drive or adding a secondary hard drive and wanting to install XP onto it....
1. Copy XP installation disk onto hard drive into say XPhome Folder.
2. If XP disk is not SP3 would suggest douwnloading XP SP3
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en
3. Download nlite and install ( helps combine xp, sp3 and sata drivers and makes new bootable disk ) or any other slipstreaming software you prefer.
http://www.nliteos.com/
4. Download and unzip sata drivers
For M3438g... http://support.ts.fujitsu.com/Download/ ... ent=VT6421 SATA
Run nlite ( hopefully is straight forward so I dont need step by step guide here...lol ) Lots of help on nlite website.
Point to XPhome folder
Add SP3
One option in nlite is to add drivers, click here and insert driver and point to where you extracted the Sata driver under...
viaraid, driver, winxp and chose the .inf here and.....
drvdisk, i386, NT5
Could download and insert all other drivers.
This assumes XP and 32bit... windows 7 doesn't need any configuration.... 64 bit you will have to experiment...lol
Hope this helps
So 120Gb, 250Gb and 500Gb works in this Amilo 3438G... the 500GB being SATA II with no jumper changes