T40 does not detect new hard drive

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Donwx · #1 Post by **Donwx** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 12:22 am

Hello I have a T40 2374 and I just got a refurbished Seagate Momentus 5400 2 80gb harddrive the problem is that the bios does not detect the harddrive and when I treid to install windows xp it came with the eror that it did not detect a harddrive.... Do I need a bios update or is this harddrive compatible thanks. Note: I did try it with a live linux cd and everything worked fine except when I looked up the system propertys it said that there was 0gb's of space.Thanks for the help.....

saux · #2 Post by **saux** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 5:26 am

mine have no problem with fujitsu 80gb HDD, have you installed the HDD correctly?

Donwx · #3 Post by **Donwx** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 5:44 am

To install dont you just put the hard drive into the hard drive slot?

lilserenity · #4 Post by **lilserenity** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 7:03 am

Have you put it in the caddy?

If not I sometimes find that the drive doesn't seat properly. I find the best way to do this is to tilt the ThinkPad T40 to almost face upsidedown so that the hard disk slides in resting against the inside of the palm rest rather than having the Thinkpad the 'right' way up, as it doesn't seat onto the IDE connector properly if it is.

It would seem the connector is not at the bottom of the hard disk slot, but at the top and only the top row of pins get connected without the caddy when the drive is slid in the right way up.

Also put your ear to the palm rest to hear if it spins up.

Vicky

#5 Post by **GomJabbar** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 10:36 am

Vicky is right. That happened to me.

Donwx · #6 Post by **Donwx** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 12:32 pm

Ijust put it in and after the windows xp installation finish loading and I pressed ENTER for it to install it said that it did not detect any hard disk do I need to install a hard disk using the hard drive software? Does anyone know of a hard disk install software I could download?

lilserenity · #7 Post by **lilserenity** » Tue Jul 31, 2007 2:03 pm

Donwx wrote:Ijust put it in and after the windows xp installation finish loading and I pressed ENTER for it to install it said that it did not detect any hard disk do I need to install a hard disk using the hard drive software? Does anyone know of a hard disk install software I could download?

Which means that physically the ThinkPad does not detect any hard disk plugged in. Not because of a driver or installation issue. Have you put your ear to palm rest as suggested to hear whether the hard disk has spun up or not? If you hear no sound of a drive spinning up it would suggest there are two possibilities here:

- The hard disk is not seated properly (follow above advice)
- The hard disk is a dud

If you can hear it spin up, make sure it is properly pushed in.

The drive should sit upside down in the caddy, in other words with the top metal part of the disk facing downwards and the green circuit board (PCB) part facing up.

Vicky

T40 does not detect new hard drive

T40 does not detect new hard drive

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