HDD & Win2K re-install grief

[seeker]

Howdy!

Anyone else have trouble getting a T30 to recognize harddrives? I'm trying to fix one for a friend. One of the Win2K Automatic Update packages trashed both the primary and backup FATs, so the original HDD is toast. I may be able to recover his data files eventually, but first I wanted to get him back online. That meant pulling the scrambled HDD and building the system back from scratch on a blank drive.

Absolutely NONE of the drives that I tried to replace his with were recognized in the BIOS scan except for a 40gig Travelstar that I had in my own laptop. I can read all of 'em on my Dell laptop, but his T30 with 2.06 BIOS didn't like any but the 40gig. Is this a common anti-competitive scam from IBM, or is the T30 just being balky? This SOB wouldn't even recognize my newer Hitachi 60gig drive (identical to the IBM drive except for where Hitachi spray-painted their name over the original IBM name). The Win2K CD didn't see the other drives, either, so it acts like it truly doesn't like a non-IBM drive.

Of course, he never backed up the drive. Why am I surprised?

On reinstalling Win2K with a slipstreamed SP-3, everything goes fine until the first reboot. I get a blank screen with a cursor at the top left. All of the IRQs are set in the BIOS for 11, so I suppose my other modified copy that disables ACPI won't work at all (didn't bother to try it). Again, any one out here seen similar behaviour with a fresh Win2K install? I'd have to dig around for hours to find my original Win2K disk; I've been using a modified version with the latest SPs as they're released until SP-4 :-(
*That* work of art causes BSODs on my laptop, so it's unused.


Anyone else seen troubles like these, or is this T30 just screwey?