I am working on an HP Pavilion XH156 Notebook computer. The bios is unable to detect a hard drive. Several known working hard drives have been installed (Hitachi, Toshiba, Compaq, etc.) and the system does not recognize the hard drive. A new hard drive carrier case with adapter was ordered and installed to eliminate any possibility of a bad pin connection and nothing. I am aware that the largest hard drive that can be installed in this machine is a 20 GB HDD, and that is the largest one I have tried. (Combinations of 20 and 15) What else do I need to do to get the machine to see it? I have also spoken with 2 hp technicians online and they were not even able to help. Everything else on the machine appears in good working order.

If the motherboard connection is not damaged I was going to suggest flashing the BIOS but I cannot find one from HP

Pavilion XH156

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/p...&lang=en&cc=us

Do you know if and when this computer was ever working properly?

Do you have any original setup/drivers/bios disks?

Have you tried removing the battery and only using the AC adapter?

yes, i have tried this too. the computer belongs to someone else, so i do not know how long it has been this way. I had to replace the connector between the hard drive and the motherboard because the previous person who had worked on it bent the pins and broke one off.

Is the connector slot on the board itself OK?

There does not appear to be any physical damage.