Good Afternoon,

I need someone to help me and who understands how the bios works for the Armada M700. I have TRIED to get hp to help but no go. Product to old to support. Here is my dilemma:

I am trying to update my disk drive. Currently there is a toshiba 6gb (mk6014gap) drive that works just fine with a successful install of WindowsXP. I have a toshiba 30gb (mk3014gap) drive and a seagate 60gb drive (st960822a). I cannot get the bios to successfully recognize the 30gb or 60gb drive when installed as a master in the HD bay. If I place these in an external usb hd enclosure, win xp recognizes them just fine and can be formatted and full functional. If I try to install windows xp onto this via the enclosure, it GIVES me a message that it cannot install because it cannot access the drive. Here is the message:

*****Your computer's startup program cannot gain access to the disk containing the partition or free space you chose. Setup cannot install windows xp on this hard disk.

This lack of access does not necessarily indicate an error condition. For example, disks attached to a SCSI adapter that wasn't installed by your computer manufacturer or to a secondary hard disk controller, are typically not visible to the startup program unless special software is used. Contact your computer or hard disk controller manufacturer for more information.

On x86-based computers, this message may indicate a problem with the cmos drive type settings. See your disk controller documentation for more information.*****

If the 30gb or 60gb drive is installed in the hd bay, when I boot I either get a message 1780-disk 0 failure or 1782-disk controller failure. I even have seen this message, disk parameter table or bios error system.

I have tried a great deal of way to troubleshoot this. I have tried using tweakbios and have had no luck. I even tried updating/installing intel controller drivers. I even went as far as trying hp's biosconfigutility.exe which is part of system software manager and had no luck. I have UPDATED my bios to the LATEST revision that is posted on the hp website. Due to the limited bios settings (compaq shadows/hides a majority of there bios settings on this laptop), I need to either modify the disk parameter table, enable lba, enable udma, or enable both lba and udma. As you can see it is getting to the fact that it is all relative to the bios of the m700. On another note, I can take the 30gb & 60gb drive and install it into a gateway solo 9500 with pheonix bios and have no problems with the drives being installed as master in the hd bay of the gateway. I am not happy with the fact that compaq had to LIMIT bios settings on this model. I think these are great compact computers, but **** when it comes to dealing with the bios.

Thanks,
348patterson