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0200 Failure Fixed Disk on brand new hard drive, pls HELP!!!

Posted: Sun May 10, 2009 11:39 pm
by dgurjala
Hello all,

I'm a proud owner of a Sony TZ270N. It came with a 120gb Toshiba MK1214GAH hard drive, and I want to upgrade to the 240gb Toshiba MK2431GAH drive.

Both are PATA ZIF 1.8" drives. The new one physically went in fine, but my problem is now that I can't install an OS onto the drive because of an 0200 Failure Fixed Disk.

Here what I know so far:

- on bootup, the drive is reported as "Toshiba MK2431GAH"
- in BIOS, the drive is recognized as Hard Drive 0

- however, later on bootup I get an "ERROR 0200: Failure Fixed Disk 0"
- Win XP, Win 2000 install disks can't see the drive at all
- Win 7 RC installer can see the disk, format, and partition it, but then says "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu."

- DOS boot disks cannot see the drive
- But some Linux boot disks can:
- Seatools can see the drive and says it has no problems on SMART
- testdisk can see the drive and says structure ok, have written new MBR to it, but still no luck.
- the Knoppix boot disk halts


So in summary I'm very confused. Can anyone explain what might be going on and a solution? Odd that BIOS can see it yet is reporting a drive failure, when the drive is brand new out of the sealed pack, and when disk utilities say he drive is physically fine.all on it. Anybody have any ideas? Still a BIOS issue? I'm using Sony latest TZ BIOS, version R0081N7.

Thank you very much in advance. I know others have installed a variety of drives and brands (mostly SSDs) on the TZ without issues, so I think theoretically the new drive should work!

Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 1:06 pm
by dgurjala
Could anyone tell me if the problem is indeed a BIOS limitation? Better yet, if someone could tell me how to modify the BIOS to accept the larger hard drive, I'd really appreciate it! The Sony TZ uses a Phoenix BIOS.

Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 2:52 pm
by edwin
I does recognize the disk so it is not a bios problem, if that had been a problem the system would hang and not show the drive model in the first place. it seems that you got, however unprobable, a defect disk, Dead On Arrival. Contact the shop about a replacement.

Posted: Sat May 30, 2009 10:29 am
by jlang
I am having the same problem, though I upgraded from MK8007GAH to MK2431GAH on my Samsung Q30. I have to use an adapter from CF-style connector to ZIF, so I always thought this adapter could be the problem. BIOS reports it as supposed to but then throws an ERROR 0200: Failure Fixed Disk 0 after having "Mouse initialized". It won't even boot from floppy or CD whith this drive activated.
I deactivated the drive an ran 48lbachk.exe from Intel, reporting that my BIOS does not support 48-bit-LBA, probably because it is deactivated at that point.
Still, not having 48bitLBA in BIOS should not be the problem because you can install WinXP SP2 on a large disk without BIOS-Support for big drives. All you have to do is use a partition whithin BIOS-limits for installation an then activate the rest with WinXP.

What is your status with your drive? Did you send it in?

Jürgen

Posted: Mon Sep 14, 2009 4:22 pm
by dgurjala
jurgen,

wow, thank for your reply--i missed it from back in May. I did end up sending the drive back, and it was found to be perfectly operational.

The problem was on my end and I ended up returning the drive.

But I am wiling to try again if you think I can get it to work.

Could you please explain in more detail about installing WinXP first?

Thank you!!!

Posted: Mon Sep 14, 2009 8:25 pm
by jlang
If I was you, I wouldn't waste time and money trying it again. To install Windows on a drive bigger than 137 GB, all you have to do is create a partition smaller than 137 GB and install it there. Leave the rest un-partitioned. After installation (and upgrade to SP2) you can partition the rest. But as Windows does not even see your drive, this is not an option.

The problem is that MK2431GAH has a sector size of 4096 Bytes, where 512 is normal for all "older" drives. That is what I have read somewhere I cannot remember.

I was considering upgrading bios via BiosAgent Plus since it reports a possible upgrade for my bios. But I'm afraid of killing my laptop having to send it to Samsung.

So for now I'm stuck with using the drive on USB where it works great.

Jürgen