Thinkpads Forum

I got a brand new X60s. First thing I do is install linux onto it - it's a little tricky, since have no floppy or cdrom, and debian's stable installer doesn't seem to work too well with the X60s' hardware, but I get an updated kernel onto the installer, and it boots, and installs, putting grub into the MBR (which may have been a mistake, I gather) and everything's fine. I reboot once, then make a new kernel, reboot and . . . nothing!

At this stage, the bios can't seem to see the hard disk at all - it doesn't list it in the boot menu, or anywhere in the setup (and both of those options take several minutes to display, as if they're searching for a disk, but not finding it). The thinkvantage button doesn't work either - it sits and waits, and after it times out, it just tries (and fails) to do a network boot, same as if I hadn't pressed anything at all. In the setup, the HDD diagnostic reports "Main hard disk drive is not found."

However, linux still works fine, if I boot off USB again - from the linux system, the drive is perfectly visible, and I can read and write to it as much as I want.

So what's going on here? What could I have possibly done that would make the disk entirely invisible to the BIOS? I didn't change the BIOS at all - in fact, hadn't even entered the setup screen once when the problem first started. The only thing remotely related was that I set the system clock in linux using hwclock.

Thanks for any suggestions you might have!

I believe you are a victim of hard drive geometry idiosyncrasies. See last post in the following thread.

Hard disk geometry thread

Hm.. that's very interesting. I've never had the disk out of the machine for any reason - but if linux detects the geometry differently from the way the BIOS does, I guess it would have the same effect. (since linux ignores the BIOS for such things).

In any case, the problem appears to have vanished on its own! I believe what I did to fix it was to switch the SATA setup from AHCI to Compatibility - it then worked, even after switching it back again. I guess this allowed the BIOS to figure out the 'new geometry' as it were...?