HELP, please.

My trusty old Compaq Presario 2195US lost its hard drive (a 40 Gig hitachi Traveller). (BTW, about a week or so before the crash, I went from 512 Meg to iGig of ram. The RAM update seemed to cause no issues, and it ran fine in that configuration till the drive died.

I bought it a new WD 160 Scorpio but I can't get the restore disks (or for that matter, a full WinXP OEM disk) to work to set the new drive up.

It boots to the CD Drive but after the CD starts running and the initial few screens come up, it seems like the computer begins to get very hot. Eventually, after the CD drive reads about 300 meg or so ()as measured on the little ribbon indicator on the screen) I get what appears to be a thermal shutdown of the whole system. I get no drive light activity while this is going on.

The CD was working well in both read and write mode before the OEM HD crash, and, in preparation for the new drive, I went into the BIOS and moved the CD to the top of the boot device list, to be sure that it starts there, but I still get nowhere.

The drive I bought is a 160 gig WD. All of the pins matched up on both the old and new drives, and there are no jumpers on either.

Any ideas of how to approach a fix????

Thanks very much.

 

This sounds like a temp problem, I would check the cooling fan, tube and heatsink on the cpu for dust/dirt, this will require a tear-down of the laptop, if you're uneasy about the process, definately get a pro to do it for you. This is commnon on older laptops if you have pets etc..