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Compaq Armada E500: 1782 disk controller failure

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First post, by ReleaseTheGeese

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I've an Armada E500 laptop. Until recently it booted perfectly using an IDE SSD (KingSpec SSD 2.5" PATA PA25.6 32GB).

Now when I go to boot it, it stalls with a blinking caret. I removed the HDD and tried booting a Windows 98 startup disk, but in that case it shows a "1782 disk controller failure".

I then disassembled it, but so far nothing has struck me as loose or needing re-soldiered. I'm a bit lost as to what to do. Would something need re-capped? Has the CMOS battery leaked and done damage somewhere? There were no CMOS memory problems before, so I've some doubt that's the cause.

There is a topic where another poster had the same error show with a slightly older model: Compaq Armada 1750 : 1782 Disk Controller Failure during POST but my model has a different HDD connector with a much finer joint on the motherboard, and actually uses a caddy, plus the failure to boot the floppy disk indicates it's a different cause.

Can anyone advise how I'd best go about diagnosing or solving this problem?

Kind regards,
RTG

Reply 1 of 1, by ReleaseTheGeese

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It turned out to be the SSD itself. I swapped it for a spare HDD and it booted the floppy first time. Then I formatted it and could use the HDD again.

So we've learnt that a strange quirk of this laptop is that it will report that 1782 Disk Controller Failure if there is no HDD present. Or, as I saw, when the disk is dead.

Amazing that the SSD lasted less than a year, and was used fewer than 10 times during it. But, as you can probably guess, it came from somewhere with fewer scruples regarding quality. At least it didn't actually fry the disk controller.

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