Replacing hard drive on HP Pavillion 7960 (Win ME)

[Mike_845]

Replaced hard drive on PC. Can't get CD drive door open to load Recovery disk 1. No messages on monitor. any ideas?

[Deepak_14]

Are you able to read any other cds? Just check for the hardware connections .

[Mike_845]

Have checked connections. Everything seems to be tight. Can't get any message on monitor.

[Omar Senussi]

If you just want to get your cd in/out, there is a small hole in the front of the CD drive.. you will need a piece of seriously high tech equipment next.. follow instructions below carefully!
1. straighten out one leg of a standard issue paper clip
2. inset the wire into the hole and push may need to apply some pressure.. and you may need to do a bit of "wiggling" to get the correct position.. as it were.
The tray should pop out.

Do the lights come on when you push the button, or at startup?
It may be that the CD drive ha died.. OR.. when you replaced the HD, did you by any chance change anything the CD drive is connected to?
What does the bios settings for that controller say?

[Omar Senussi]

Mike,
Re-reading your posts.. do you get ANY signal on your monitor?
Do you get the POST beep?

[Mike_845]

Thanks for everyone's help. I've got the CD to read now. My current problem is that it's not able to execute the program on the Maxtor CD. It seems to boot up a very small version of DOS. It leaves me with an X: prompt (I guess because it hasn't labeled the new hard drive as C: yet). It fails when it tries to execute the Maxtor program to (I guess) format the new hard drive. Any ideas?

[Omar Senussi]

Certainly wouldn't hurt to run fdisk and create the partition(s) on the HDD. You could also try and boot off a W2K or WinXP CD (I understand from the above thatyou CAN boot from CD?)

[Ron Kinner]

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

has bootdisks with CD support but make sure you have the CD drive plugged up correctly.

Ron