New Hard Drive

[Tackleberry]

I've got an 18 month old PCG-K115B, which has been perfectly fine. Until now, the only modification has been to upgrade it to 1Gb memory.

However, I' ve recently tried to replace the 40Gb hard drive with a Fujitsu MHU2100AT 100Gb unit. When trying to set up from the Sony Recovery Disk, the computer randomly crashes to a blue screen with a Stop: 0x0000008e message. This occurs regardless of whether I've got 1Gb or the original 512Mb memory sticks in. The crashes can occur at any stage from partitioning the drive via the recovery utility to trying to restore my documents and settings after what looks like a succesful installation.

Today, I've tried to install Windows XP, with pretty similar effects, random crashes at various stages of the installation or restoration of Documents & Settings. When I put my original hard drive back in, the PC returns to it's happily running state.

One other thing that I have noticed, there is a BIOS update available to R0110X1. Would a BIOS update have any effect on the hard drive capacity?

Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered.

[rich912]

This particular error code usually relates to a memory problem, either over population or bad RAM, but you seem to have eliminated that by returning to the original configuration.

A BIOS upgrade may be the solution, if not then a smaller capacity HDD might be the answer.

[Tackleberry]

I also got two other recurring error messages, again completely random and on a blue screen;

"PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA " which links to microsoft supports and say it could be related to a Lexar driver.
and
"STOP 0x000000D1 DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL "
which again provides a link to microsoft support regarding 3rd party drivers.

Any idea if it's worth mirroring the drive through a desktop?

[rich912]

Any idea if it's worth mirroring the drive through a desktop?

That may be worth a try as it should sort out any driver issues.

Btw, I assume that you didn’t have any devices (USB, PC Card etc) attached to the notebook during the install – do you have any Lexar devices? It may also be worth setting the BIOS to default values.

[Tackleberry]

No, there was nothing attached to the laptop. When it came up with the Lexar Driver I wondered if it was anything to do with Memory stick, but that was all lthat I could think of.

I probably won't get round to doing anything with it this weekend, but I'll keep updating as I progress, my failures may prove useful to someone else.