I recently got a new IBM travelstar 48GB HDD for my dell latitude CPt V466GT. I loaded win 2000 on it having partitioned it into two drives. Win was on the c:. I wanted to install win 2000 server on it, and it was giving hassles writing over the win 2000 prof installation. So I deleted the c: partition in the setup and left it to format. Upon restarting, Setup could not recognise my harddisk anymore. It saw 45GB but could not read it. The laptop does not even recognise that there in a HD attached to it in anymore. Putting my old HD in and connecting the new one via USB, in the windows device manager, I can see the USB mass strage device, but it says there is an error - 'windows could not start device' is the official description. Can you think of anything that could be the problem and what I can do to fix things? I have tried starting up under DOS and running fdisk. fdisk says that no hd can be found.

I would guess that deleting the C partition gives the OS noplace to boot into, since C always contains your system boot and .ini files. Go to Samsung's site and download CLEARHDD: http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/support/faqs/faqs_20000120_0000000036.htm Follow directions and hose your whole disk, and set it up fresh. That will fix your problems. Post back and let me know if it worked, okay?

You said: Putting my old HD in and connecting the new one via USB, in the windows device manager, I can see the USB mass storage device, but it says there is an error - 'windows could not start device' is the official description. From what I read the travelstar doesn't do USB, just ATA-100 The first thing to do is to get the machine to recognize the new hard disk. Take the old drive out, put the new one in. boot to bios and see if it finds it. if so then use fdisk and delete all partitions. create a new partition or 2 and use NTFS as your file system. You can format the drive after that although i seem to recall the installation process will do that for you