warrenb

I have a Compaq Presario F572US laptop with an internal Seagate Momentus 5400.3 80GB Serial AT Disc Drive
CT: 2B7CC0183UO124 HP: 418264-001 PN: 9S1132-020

It's fails when I do a drive test from the BIOS screen and I can't boot so I need to replace it.

I need to identify compatible replacement drives and haven't been able to get that info from HP because they want to sell me one of their very expensive ones. I don't need a lot of storage because I network the laptop and use external USB drives with it for data.

grimx133

You can replace it with basically the same drive, what's the seagate model number on the drive?
Not sure about the drive mounting in the compaq machines, but I changed one in an hp (ide drive) and it has a part that goes over the connectors so that it'll connect, you couldn't just install the drive without the "caddy", for lack of a better word. Not sure on your sata drive, changed a sata in a dell and it didn't have any sort of adapter on the connectors, but did have a mounting frame if I recall correctly. Dodgy memory sometimes eh.
Anyway, this is probably the same model as your drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148128

You can probably go larger, I'll generally go up a size or two in capacity, but don't like to go too too big, just in case. The hp/compaq site may say how larger of a drive it'll take. However, it sounds like you don't need larger, so may be best off replacing it with as close to the same as you can find.
Hopefully you made the recovery discs when you got the laptop, otherwise you may be able to purchase a set from hp.

warrenb

Grimx133,

Thanks for the advice. I had a chat with Seagate and they advised me that their newer Momentus drives should be compatible but of course I would have to contact HP to be sure. There is a sleeve on the defect drive which I can remove and hope to be able to use on the replacement.

I found a Seagate - 250GB Internal Serial ATA Hard Drive for Laptops Model: ST90250N1A1 at Best Buy for $10 more than the 80GB drive and I can walk in and pick it up so I think I am going in that direction. I already ordered a Vista/Drivers Recovery disc from HP because they didn't provide one with the laptop when I purchased it.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1218030894551

Thanks.
WarrenB

warrenb

And I thought this would be easy.

I bought the 250GB Seagate Momentus 2.5" 5400 RPM drive and physically installed it in my Compaq F572US laptop without issue. I started it up and went to the BIOS screen and successfully ran a drive test. So far so good.

I had ordered and received a System Recovery DVD for Compaq 32-Bit notebooks from HP so I popped it in the DVD drive and started the laptop up. The DVD was loaded successfully onto the new hardrive and ejected asking me if there was another disc which there wasn't so I removed the DVD and continued. Still so far so good.

After several auto restarts a Welcome to Vista Home Premium Screen displayed with a message Preparing your Desktop. More auto shutdowns and restarts were done with desktop icons now visible each time. Then an FBI GUI task displayed on the taskbar which I opened and saw an HP screen saying software being installed. Then the machine just stayed in a restart loop which I let run overnight and 8 hours later it was still looping so I shutdown the machine.

I researched this issue and there seems to be many postings on HP user forums complaining about the HP Recovery Disk. If I restart the machine it starts Vista from the new hardrive but goes back into the FBISM.exe restart loop. I can go into safe mode and it doesn't loop.

I contacted HP who said the drive is not compatible blah, blah, blah. They gave me thier own replacement models which I noticed only went up to 120GB. I asked about a 250GB option and the support person who was able to offer no real help or explanations said my laptop doesn't support a 250GB drive. When I read some of the user forums there was one suggestion to let the recovery drive run as long as it needs to until it asks for a Vista launguage option. Other posts talked about a disk partitioning issue that could correct the problem.

If this 250GB drive passed the BIOS test and was reformated and has Vista loaded onto it. Isn't it compatible? The FBISM.exe that runs and causes the loop loads HP software. Isn't the problem more likely with the Recovery DVD? I would hate to return the 250GB drive and buy a more expensive smaller HP oem drive only to find that the problem wasn't solved.

warrenb

I just started up the laptop in safe mode and used windows explorer to look at the hard drive. Out of the 250GB available on the physical drive only 24GB are allocated to Local Disk: (C:) and 16.2 GB are Used and 7.75 GB are Free. There are no other drives visible aside from the CD/DVD Drive (D:)

The User Forum posts on the HP support site suggested a partitioning solution to this problem.

grimx133

Take a look in disk management and see if there is unallocated space. If so, right click on that
space and run the new partition wizard.

warrenb

Conclusion:

The laptop is back in service with a new 250GB hard drive and all the necessary software. The HP Recovery Disk and Chat Support is crap.

What I had to do was to stop the recovery process right after the initial start up of Vista before it configured a desktop or anything else. Then I allocated the full drive space to the C: partition and disabled the HP FBI.exe so it would not resume it's recovery process. From there it was just a matter of establishing a network connection, updating Vista from the MS website, and manually installing and configuring the software that I actually needed. I should have done this a long time ago because of all the crap that gets put on these machines by the manufacturers but I am not the laptop user so it never got done.

Thanks grimx133

grimx133

Yikes! That's what you call jumping through hoops eh.

You'd think that the oem's would stop sludging up the os with all the junk. Funny how
an os without bloatware can be an option that you have to pay for sometimes. Less
is more, and all that.