Need help with a XP laptop that won't boot

[evlfred]

I have this laptop of a customers and this is the second time this has happened. Originally, I put a larger hard drive in this machine in September and copied the operating system back over to the computer. Everything was fine until January when one day he turned it on and no boot just the post screen and then the black screen with blinking cursor. Tried everything and ended up copying his data (manually from another machine) and then reformat and reinstall of XP. Today it happened again, tried fixmbr/fixboot but to no avail, partition looks fine from another machine, right now I'm imaging the partition and I'm going to VM it to play around and see what I can find, anyone have anything else to try or any idea why this has happened twice now?

 

[Stoney]

I've seen this on HP laptops when the hdd checks out ok, I check if an update is available for the bios.

 

[evlfred]

WOOT! Fixed it, here's what happened. When I created the VM from the drive image it booted just fine, which told me it had to be hardware related. This is a Dell Latitude D600 that originally had a 60Gb Drive in it. We replaced it with a 160Gb drive, and at the time I updated the BIOS to the latest version to avoid the 137Gb limit (I've always had good luck with that). I remembered about the BIOS update and looked in the BIOS, bingo it only sees a 137Gb drive, which isn't a big deal as once the BIOS hands off the drive addressing to windows the limit is gone. HOWEVER, if there is data written to the area above 137Gb, BAM, no boot, no hand off to windows. I re-sized the partition to 125Gb and it boots fine now. Apparently, Dell couldn't (or more likely failed to) put in a 48bit LBA into the later BIOS revisions.