[OpenOutcome]

Hello GeeksToGo,

I am fairly computer savvy, so this is annoying that I'm having so much trouble.

My laptop, Dell Inspiron 1545, has Windows 7 installed. Two days ago, I deleted a partition on my drive that was used for BackTrack Linux. I'm sure it was the linux partition, and yes, NOT my windows partition. It was only a 5gb partition.

Next thing I know, on my next boot, I get stuck at the "Starting Windows" screen. Just the little colored windows pulsating back and forth endlessly.. for hours. I restarted many times, and just left it on over night last night to see what would happen. Nothing.

Next, I went for my Windows 7 Install disk, with the recovery. It will boot it up, loading all the files, then when it gets to the "starting up" screen - to get into the recovery section - it will stick again. So no, I CAN'T try a recovery option, because I can't even get there.

I did some massive Googling, and some people found it was an option in their bios that let them through. I have undone, and checked every single option in the bios, to no avail. Some people thought it was a hardware issue, so I performed some minor surgery on my laptop, leaving only minimal things plugged in- no go. Also, it can't be a hardware issue, as I plugged the drive into my desktop as a slave and still no go.

The drive is a Hitachi HTS54323L9A300. It has regular SATA power and data ports. I plugged them into my Desktop gaming PC and booted..

In the Bios, it is recognized, and I put it under my western digital desktop drive in boot order. For some lame reason, it takes over, and no matter where it is set in boot priority, it will hang at "Starting Windows" on boot!

So I booted my desktop, plugged it in after I was at my desktop, and looked in the Device Manager. After scanning, it found it. And tried installing drivers, and found NONE. Which is completely strange, because I have another drive, same model, after plugging it in, I find drivers almost instantly.

Eventually it gives up, labeling it as "Disk Drive" and no drivers are installed. If I go into Properties, or Update Drivers, my whole computer will freeze. What the...?

I really don't want to lose data, but if I have to reformat the drive.. how am I going to even get to that stage?? It's really starting to bug me.

Thanks to anyone who read this novel, or anyone who can shed some light.

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Hi,
I had a similar problem with my new build. The drive i used was an external but suitable for taking out of the caddy and installing internally.
To cut a long story short. I narrowed it down to having to format the drive in the new build.
I had to place the drive in an external caddy and copy all the contents to another drive (2 hour job), placed the sata lead in a different port so it would be recognised again and the then in diskmgmt.msc format the drive. It works fine now!

[greenshorts]

Hi,
I had a similar problem with my new build. The drive i used was an external but suitable for taking out of the caddy and installing internally.
To cut a long story short. I narrowed it down to having to format the drive in the new build.
I had to place the drive in an external caddy and copy all the contents to another drive (2 hour job), placed the sata lead in a different port so it would be recognised again and the then in diskmgmt.msc format the drive. It works fine now!

[OpenOutcome]

Thanks for the reply,

I don't have an external caddy currently, so I just bought one online. When it arrives, I'll see if I can get it to grab contents off the disk, or at least format it..

Could you tell me what kind of external caddy you used? Cheers.

[greenshorts]

The caddy i used was a sata to usb so basically your making a external hard drive to remove the data.