NX6110 CD-ROM drive doesn't appear

[MikeDee]

I just replaced the hard drive in my NX6110. I reinstalled Windows XP w/SP2.  XP was installed from Microsoft CDs, not the restore CDs.

A couple of unusual things happened after the install.  Sometimes the CD drive was not available.  I could boot from it, but it wouldn't show up in Windows, nor the device manager.  If I rebooted, it would sometimes appear.  Also, would occasionally see a message on startup - something like "error 1780 on disk 1".  I eventually removed the device from Windows (forget how) and rebooted.  Windows recognized it, added it back, and all seemingly worked well.

But I noticed another strange thing.  The hard drive lite always stayed on.  At first I thought the machine was accessing it. I disabled indexing and system restore.  Still stayed on. I think the problem has to do with the jumpers on the new hard drive.  The drive is a Western Digital.  I looked up the jumper settings and tried a couple.  None seemed to fix the problem.  But now the CD ROM drive is not accessible at all - can't even boot from it.  On a positive not, the HDD light only goes on when being accessed.

What is the fix for getting both the HDD light and CD ROM drive to work properly?

[Huffer]

The correct jumper setting for the nx6110 hard drive is cable select. To jumper a laptop drive CS you need to put a jumper across 2 of the 4 pins that stand off by themselves, adjacent to and parallel with the green side of the drive.

If that does not resolve the issue with the optical drive, then check again if you can boot from it. If so then you need to try the upper and lower filter registry adjustment or possibley even reinstall Windows.

Try this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/EN-US/

[MikeDee]

Thanks, I have tried the jumper settings for cable select. The manufacturer of the CDROM drive describes the jumper settings here: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/popup_adp.php?p_sid=undefined&p_lva=undefined&p_li=undefined&p_faqid=84&p_created=1005005461&p_sp=undefined I also tried the upper/lower filter fix. Drive is still not accessible. How can I reinstall Windows without a CDROM drive that works? As it stands, the machine will not boot off the drive. BIOS is set to boot from the drive, but I don't believe the machine can see it.

[Huffer]

I think your CD drive is likely dead and the troubles you got were as a result of its death throes. Sometimes they linger for a while and come back and go out before checking out permanently. My best advice is to get a CD drive. It should be cheap on ebay as it uses the MultiBay drive standard which applies across lots of Compaq/HP models.

The other way to install Windows Xp is with a DOS install. You format the drive bootable to a C:/ prompt and make sure to get smartdrv.exe on there and activate it with autoexec.bat and config.sys entries. You also copy the whole i386 folder from the Xp CD onto the hard drive. This cannot be done from a restore disk, even an HP OS recovery CD, which otherwise acts just like a Windows install disk. You need a retail or OEM Windows CD. You also obviously need a laptop hard drive to usb adapter and another computer and a usb floppy drive helps a lot, too. 

The specific instructions to do this are rather involved and I do not want to type them out if you are not going to do it so post back if interested. This is one of my rather arcane talents; getting Windows onto computers with minimal hardware available to do it with. 

[Huffer]

As a last easy resort you might try a cleaner disk on the CD drive. It might just be a dirty lens. This would only be true (possibly) if the drive shows up in My Computer but just will not read a disk.