Ultra-ATA Blinking Cursor

[krutaw]

I've read quite a few posts about the dreaded "Blinking cursor" issue with the T40 / T41 laptops, however, I've run into a slightly different issue.

First, let me give some background on what I'm doing to get to the blinking cursor. My company utilizes Symantec's (formerly PowerQuest's) pqideploy for linux to deploy our images to machines. We remove the pre-desktop area and disable the option in the bios (is it just me, or did it seem odd to put the option under "Security") so that the entire drive can be utilized.

We have T40/T41 laptops that have ATA drives in them that are working just fine, however, the second I put an Ultra-ATA drive in and image the laptop, the result ends with a blinking cursor after the IBM logo screen.

At first, I thought that this might be caused by an incompatibility with Ultra-ATA drives. That was quickly proved incorrect by installing Windows XP manually using a CD.

I have attempted to use other imaging software (PartImage for linux) with the same results. I would really prefer to not include the pre-desktop partition if I don't have to since we have a custom image and imaging system that is significantly faster than IBM's cute little blue button.

Any ideas?