[ahlaptop]

Toshiba Laptop A55 Windows XP Home (my brother's, not mine). Original 80GB hard drive was working fine but getting full. So I upgraded it for my brother to a WD Scropio 160GB drive, by cloning the 80GB to it. The new drive worked great for a month, then stopped booting (after he hibernated). Now he gets the infamous "blinking dash" after POST.

The old 80GB drive boots fine when you put it back in the laptop. So I assume the laptop itself is fine.

I assumed the new drive was new dead but it works fine in an enclosure. I can copy all files needed off of it. Scandisk shows no errors. The drive makes no unusual noises and seems fast.

I then tried fixboot from the Windows CD and also copying the original MBR (446 bytes, not the partition table) from the original drive back to the new drive. Still the same problem, no changes.

What's left? I'm running a full Norton AV scan on the new drive (since it had Norton running all along before I doubt it has a virus). Boot sector virus is possible I guess, I thought fixboot/fixmbr would get rid of that but just to be sure, I'm letting Norton do its thing.

Any other ideas? It could still be a hardware problem I suppose. (WD diagnostic tool found no problems.) File corruption problems on some of the boot files? Any good way to diagnose the Windows boot sequence? I already tried adding /sos in the boot.ini file but I still see no text upon attempt to boot, just the blinking dash.

[jasaiyajin]

So this new drive is recognized in the bios completely? Also, do you hear it spin up?

Strange that it works in an enclosure. Tried loading safe defaults and reseting bios then saving?