T42, 1.8" microSATA SSD and adapter board; drive not seen

[burns334]

I built up a 1.8" microSATA setup with a Shapeways caddy, Chinese adapter board and Kingston 1.8" microSATA drive. Installed the 1.8" microSATA setup in HDD0 and booted off of original HDD mounted in the Ultrabay, all normal. Opened Easeus to clone and all drives were present, cloned the drive, all said good. Removed Ultrabay and started machine and no system was found, used F12 at startup and the 1.8" microSATA SSD is no longer seen, went into the BIOS, boot order is okay. Removed power, battery and drives and did the 10 resets trick. Reinsert Ultrabay with original drive and everything boots fine but no SSD is seen in HDD0, any ideas, thanks in advance

burns

[dr_st]

Does the original drive work in the internal bay (HDD0)?

Most likely just the adapter board is toast. Check the SSD in a different setup if possible.

[burns334]

dr-st, I think your are right, original drive back in HDD and all boots fine, no way to check 1.8" microSATA by itself, it does not fit in my SATA ultrabay drive.

burns

Edit: board vendor says to update the bios, is there any merit in that?

[burns334]

Well folks, I've been sent a replacement adapter board and I'm going to give it another try the same way tonight anybody got any suggested changes?

burns

[Neil]

I think I would try installing something (maybe a light Linux distro) directly onto the 1.8" microSATA drive with the current hardware,and see if that works OK. Might just be something with your cloning process. It wouldn't be the first time a cloned drive would not boot.

On the other hand, I guess it wouldn't hurt to try the replacement adapter first, in case the first one was faulty. Everything could just boot up like expected in that case. But, if that doesn't work, then you could try a direct install to the 1.8" microSATA drive to see if that works.

[burns334]

Neil, everything first time around everything was gone after first attempt at clone, the 1.8" microSATA could no longer be seen, so game over, nothing else I could do. No way to see a 1.8" microSATA without an adapter as it won't mate with anything, ie not ide, not sata

burns

[burns334]

Folks, the new board arrived and it was slightly different, it was to Rev1 of the board, anyway I assembled the same way into the shapeways caddy, plugged the 1.8" microSATA SSD in and inserted in HDD0. While the machine booted I hit F12 and the drive was visible in the boot list. Cloned the 1.8" microSATA SSD with Easytodo and no problem. The T42 works fairly well with the following numbers

Seq write 83 mbs read 79 mbs
512k write 82 mbs read 39 mbs
4k write 14 mbs read 16
4k QD32 write 16 mbs read 23 mbs

[burns334]

Folks, as you can see above I built a SSD for my T42 14" using a 1.8" microSATA, Shapeways caddie and a Chinese adapter board. I was happy with the performance when in cranked out about 90 Mbs read and write speeds. I moved the drive over to my 15" T42 and the speeds are horrible, like 30 mbs ie same as the old hard drive, what gives? Moved it back to 14" and it's fine. The machines are the same (I think) except the 14" has a 2.0 cpu and the 15" a 1.7 cpu.

burns

Moderator edit: Merged this post in with existing, directly related thread (no need to start yet another new thread).

[burns334]

Bump, anyone have any thoughts on this?

[burns334]

Automobus suggested by PM checking the bios and ec on each machine, well they are different, the 14" is at bios 3.21 and ec 3.04, the 15" is at bios 3.13 and ec 3.04, what do you think? get them up to date or atleast the 15" upto 3.21/3.04?

burns

Searching shows the latest Bios is 3.23 and EC 3.04

[RealBlackStuff]

Before you do anything stupid, check if those machines have the same (or different ) graphics...
They have different BIOS.

[burns334]

RBS, both machines have the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 Graphics

burns

[automobus]

I would try flashing BIOS revision 3.20. Maybe: T40/R50 BIOS versions from earlier three years contained a routine/program, similar to that in earlier ThinkPads. Maybe everybody else who bought mSATA for Tforty, already had new firmware versions, so nobody else yet experienced this problem.

Subject: New SSD opt. for T4x : mSATA-to-IDE adapter ST663FD9 *PICS*

My new suspicion: firmware in certain mobile PCs derive host cable detection bit from devices at power-on, instead of always indicating 80-wire. Some models which might be so-programmed include ThinkPads: X22 T30 T23 A31p;

It changes something in ATA Identify, so it might also change cable-detection speed-limit.

<3.20 (1RETDOWW)>
- (Fix) Hang up when HDD identification is failed.