Dell Latitude CPi-A 400XT: Hard Drive Related Issues
Well, I recently purchased a Dell Latitude CPi-A off ebay.
It's in rather nice condition, it almost /looks/ as if someone purchased it and then just put it away. The only thing about it is, it did not come with a hard drive. It came with the caddy and all. (And oh by the way, I have a plethora of spare parts for the CPi series, I've owned one before and upgraded and changed out a lot of things.)
So, the deal is, I have this 18gb [Toshiba] 2.5" drive that came out of an circa 2002 Compaq laptop and I've been using it in a 2.5" enclosure as a glorified jump drive for almost a year now, but I partitioned it and prepared it for use in this Dell just before it's arrival in the mail. I made the first partition 45% of the hard drive in FAT32 for WinXP and 40% more of the hard drive ext3 for Backtrack2 final and the remaining 5% linux swap.
Now I tried two different caddies, all possible jumper settings and still I would get the message "Primary Hard Disk 0 Not Found"
So, the BIOS version at the time was A05. I updated it to the latest A15. (What a jump.) and this only slightly improved the situation.
Now, when the hard drive is indeed in the computer and I boot it up, I get this message asking for a hard drive password. Obviously attempts to guess or do anything to get past this fail. After 3 tries it aborts. I get the No hard disk message and then I can boot from Floppy and/or CDRom as usual, or even enter the BIOS of which is still insists there is no hard drive. Whither or not that is because I failed the password or not, I do not know. I'd like to think yes and I'd also like to think that if I can get this hard disk password thing out of the way updating the BIOS did in fact fix my first issue of no HDD detected.
Unfortunately, I have no other 2.5" hard drives to test at this time. The original 2.5" hard drive (6gb IBM) that I had with my previous CPi, unfortunately died recently. I was using that for a jump drive as well.
Any light shed on this situation would be greatly appreciated.
Anything else you need to know just ask.
-Matthew
It's in rather nice condition, it almost /looks/ as if someone purchased it and then just put it away. The only thing about it is, it did not come with a hard drive. It came with the caddy and all. (And oh by the way, I have a plethora of spare parts for the CPi series, I've owned one before and upgraded and changed out a lot of things.)
So, the deal is, I have this 18gb [Toshiba] 2.5" drive that came out of an circa 2002 Compaq laptop and I've been using it in a 2.5" enclosure as a glorified jump drive for almost a year now, but I partitioned it and prepared it for use in this Dell just before it's arrival in the mail. I made the first partition 45% of the hard drive in FAT32 for WinXP and 40% more of the hard drive ext3 for Backtrack2 final and the remaining 5% linux swap.
Now I tried two different caddies, all possible jumper settings and still I would get the message "Primary Hard Disk 0 Not Found"
So, the BIOS version at the time was A05. I updated it to the latest A15. (What a jump.) and this only slightly improved the situation.
Now, when the hard drive is indeed in the computer and I boot it up, I get this message asking for a hard drive password. Obviously attempts to guess or do anything to get past this fail. After 3 tries it aborts. I get the No hard disk message and then I can boot from Floppy and/or CDRom as usual, or even enter the BIOS of which is still insists there is no hard drive. Whither or not that is because I failed the password or not, I do not know. I'd like to think yes and I'd also like to think that if I can get this hard disk password thing out of the way updating the BIOS did in fact fix my first issue of no HDD detected.
Unfortunately, I have no other 2.5" hard drives to test at this time. The original 2.5" hard drive (6gb IBM) that I had with my previous CPi, unfortunately died recently. I was using that for a jump drive as well.
Any light shed on this situation would be greatly appreciated.
Anything else you need to know just ask.
-Matthew
Comments
The fact that you've been able to use that hard disk before this suggests to me that it's not the disk that's causing the problem.
-Q
There is a header for "hard drive passwords" but this area has nothing to edit. I also read on the CPi manual that in order for hard drive password support to be available the hard drive must have been purchased from Dell. For one, the hard drive came out of a Compaq, two it's been formated at least a dozen times since.
I'm so confused about all of this.
PS. The only way to reset the CMOS on a CPi-A would be to remove the battery and I'm not quite ready to go jumping into tearing this little number apart just yet.
Edit: Typos
-Q
Would it help perhaps if I posted an image of the screen in question at this point? My digital camera is in a half broke state, but I could take a crack at it.
Edit: It appears I have successfully misplaced my digital camera, however I do have a webcam yet...... meh. lol.
Dell BIOS Password Removal
Unlocking a Password Protected HDD
HDD Password for a Dell Lappy?
BIOS Reset contact information
My idea though is that if there is only an HDD password setup and no other, try setting up a master password, usually with security like that you can override the other password by having the master one.
Edit: Added one more link
I've downgraded the BIOS, A07 currantly, the harddrive password problem is gone but still left with the issue of
"Primary Hard Disk 0 not found"
And I went so far as to reformat and repartition the hard drive as one large FAT32.
-Matthew
What spec is it proc and ram wise + gfx?
Also, for a very short period of time I had a 30gb hard drive in my old CPI-A and the BIOS detected it. I'm thinking maybe it just does not like this specific drive, I'm going to try to get my hands on any other 2.5" HDD to test ASAP.
I don't know what else to do at this point.
-Matthew