HDD tray: Slow transfers and system crashes

[kokni]

Hello, I am new to this forum

I have a T41 and I have a problem with the ultrabay HDD tray:

The system disk is a Hitachi 7k100 and on the tray lies the original Hitachi HTS548040M9AT00 (40Gb, 5400rpm).

The problem is that the file transfers between the two disks are slow and on large file transfers (>500Mb) the system just crashes.

According to the device manager the tray HDD initally is UDMA if unistalled/installed but always reverts back to the PIO mode after a while.

Also, the event log indicates the following errors:
ftdisk Warning (51) : \Device\Harddisk1\D Error while paging
disk Error (15): \Device\Harddisk1\D Not ready to access
and if I just ignore the errors and keep operating the disk, it will either crash the system or the disk will disappear:
PlugPlayManager Error (12): IDE\DiskHTS548040M9AT00 disappeared without first disconnecting

I would presume the tray HDD is going dead but apparently when I tranfer files between it and an external disk everything works fine !!?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated !

[jdhurst]

I had a second drive in my desktop that went to PIO and slowed down drastically. My (limited) research said that this occured because of physical drive errors over time and the cure was to eliminate the errors. In my case, I had to format the second drive to eliminate the errors (painful because of the large amount of data stored). I don't know of another way beside formatting, but someone else may know. ... JD Hurst

[GomJabbar]

In addition to what JD Hurst said, I read recently that chkdsk was needed to fix a slow and problematic hard drive (for instructions on how to use, type chkdsk in Windows Help and Support). Take a look at the two links below.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=37842

http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/i ... /udma_fix/

[kokni]

Thanks for your help but the problem is still there.

Chkdsk is OK, formatted with no probs and all the registry keys are in place.

Could someone clarify: Is the tray hdd supposed to be hot swapable in the T41+WinXP ? I don't have a disk password but still, it does not work unless I reboot.

Lastly, being the original hdd with the HPA partition and the old primary and "active" system partition, is that a problem ?
The reason I ask is that under device manager-properties both disks appear to have the same position 0(0).

[jdhurst]

<snip>
Could someone clarify: Is the tray hdd supposed to be hot swapable in the T41+WinXP ? I don't have a disk password but still, it does not work unless I reboot. <snip>

There may be more than one clarification.
1. If the tray hard drive is just a data drive, then it is hot swappable in a T41. I have a T41, I have the ultrabay insert, and I have a second drive. I have no issue inserting the drive and accessing it, and then (using the eject tool properly), removing it.

2. If the tray hard drive has the same XP license on it as the main drive, *and* is at SP2, then the setup will likely hose one of the drives. I have had this issue, stopped, and never went further.

... JD Hurst

[smugiri]

Maybe the drive is running in PIO mode. Try turning on DMA.

Instructions here