Acer laptop not detecting new hard drive

Hiya,

I have an Acer 1640 laptop and want to upgrade the hard drive from the original Toshiba 80GB to a Samsung 160GB drive, but when I put the new drive into the laptop BIOS does not detect it.
All BIOS passwords, supervisor, User and HDD are blank.
If I connect the new hard drive to another computer via a USB adaptor it works OK.
The old hard drive still works fine in the laptop and if I connect it to another computer via a USB adaptor I can access all the files so there is no HDD password set.
The BIOS version is 3A05, the latest. Is there anything i can do to get the BIOS to detect the new hard drive?

I have emailed Acer but all I got was this "useful" response
Regarding your query, we understand the new hard-drive is not detected in your unit and it is detected in the other unit. We apologize as we are unable to support you in regard to this issue. We would request you to get in touch with a local technician who can assist you regarding the issue.

Note: As per the records the unit is out of warranty.

Thanks,
Steve

Is it a SATA drive? There may be a jumper on the drive to force to SATA1 if it is a SATA2 drive.

no its a 2.5" IDE drive

Hmm, I can't say I have ever experienced problems with IDE drives. There is a well-known issue with some motherboards not recognising drives over 126GB~, however as I understand it this was filesystem related.

If the BIOS is not detecting it at all (I assume you are actually going into the BIOS setup, and double checking it is not detected whatsoever), then I am out of ideas myself, seems the chipset/BIOS simply is not compatible with the hard disk drive, can you confirm the drive does spin up during bootup?

Is there any jumper pins on the HDD?

Ensure pins are seating properly.

Is the new drive master/slave jumper correctly set (try it both ways)

Actually googling around a bit finds a couple of threads making the same complaint - the Acer 1640 doesn't recognize Samsung 160Gb drives.

Do you have access to any other 2.5" IDE drives to try?

Right! 3A05 isn't the latest BIOS and one post had someone claiming that 3A06 worked - get it here ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_1640/bios/

trying it now thanks, I was looking on the Acer UK site and that said 3A05 was the latest..... rubbish website!!

It worked!!
spot on, thanks for finding that latest BIOS, lifesaver

Please, can anyone post a link where download the bios file? previous link posted said:
"/notebook/aspire_1640/bios/: No such file or directory"

thanks a lot!