Need help with fixing a laptop. Please look

madazn89

Hi,
I got a laptop(a ASUS brand) from my friend, and he said that something was wrong with it. The problem was, when I turn on the laptop, there is no signal going to the screen(but the fan turns on and the CD-rom and the indicater that the computer is on still works), and later I discovered there was no sigal going to/from the USB(because I plugged a USB memory stick in and it did not light up). So I opened up the laptop and disconnected some chips such as the processer, ram, screen. I put it back together and there was still no siginal. I gave up, I thought it was something wrong with the video card or something, but today I opened it up again, detached everything, and put them back together. Surprisingly, I got input onto the screen! I am not a computer expert, so I have no idea why it just suddenly worked. Now I can go into that setup screen by pressing f2. The computer said I needed a operating system. I popped in a dell windows xp install cd to see if I can install a operating system onto the laptop. Now here comes the problem that I am stuck on now. When I pop in the cd, this is what happened: The cd runs and it goes into a blue screen called windows setup and at the bottom it says setup is loading files(blah blah blah). After its done loading the files and says setup is loading windows. Than after this it went two different ways: the first time it just turned off like it crashed or something after it displays setup is loading windows another time it doesnt crash and goes to another blue screen and in that screen there was three choices, press enter to install windows xp, press R to repair windows xp, and press f3 to cancel setup. When I chose install windows xp, it goes to another blue screen and it displays something like this, Windows can not detect any hard disks installed on this computer. Please check that all hard disks are properly plugged and powered, also if you need to install a hard disk, run the manufacturers setup disk. It said something like that. I checked the hard drive ( which I think is the hard drive looking thing at the side of the laptop, in which I could pull out, and also has a label starting with HD23424-4GB) to make sure it was plugged in right. I rebooted many times, sometimes it crashes and sometimes it goes to the other blue screen and than saying the hard disk cannot be detected. I am not sure what the problem is. Can someone please give me some advice and help on this problem.
Thank you,
Frank

hondashadow

Did you take a look in the BIOS to see if the harddisk is properly configured?

madazn89

: Did you take a look in the BIOS to see if the harddisk is properly configured?
:
I figured out that the hard drive is corrupted. Is there any way I can fix it or something or do I need to get another hard drive? Does they type of hard drive matter?

hondashadow

: I figured out that the hard drive is corrupted. Is there any way I can fix it or something or do I need to get another hard drive? Does they type of hard drive matter?
:
It depends; sometimes a good disktool (check out the supplier's website) can get it working fine again, but if there are bad sectors on the disk you'd better go for a new one.
For your laptop you'll need a 2.5" drive. Check the documentation of the motherboard or the motherboard manufacturer's website to see what drives are supported. Specially with older BIOSes you might run into size restrictions. You wouldn't want to risk buying an expensive huge disk only to find out that you can only access the first two gigabytes!
Such a BIOS can sometimes be updated (flashed) to be able to access bigger disks. For that you'd probably have to check the BIOS manufacturer's website.
Good luck with it!

Hondashadow.