SSD T41 not possible :(

[shoebox9]

I recently bought a second hand T41 to create a totally silent notebook (for reading/study, sure the main fan kicks in if you work the CPU).

Next I bought a 32GB SSD, and cloned the current 32Gb h/drive partitions onto it.

No boot. Not from the standard drive slot, not in a slim drive caddy, not via USB.

So I install XP SP2 onto the SSD in the standard drive slot, but still get the same error messages-

* IBM Hard Drive Active Protection sensor diagnostics start (seen only in diagnostics boot mode- this is where I'm guessing all my problems are coming from)
* Intel Boot Agent GE v1.2.17
* Preboot eXecution Environment (Network Boot Protocol- which I can't get rid of)
* Intel Boot Agent PXE Base Code (BA1217BC)
* Initiating and establishing link
* PXE-E61 : Media test falure, check cable
* PXE-M0F : Exiting Intel Boot Agent
* Operating System not found

Is there any way to disable the "IBM Hard Drive Active Protection sensor diagnostics" ? Lenovo loves us so much, they seem to have made sure this wonderful feature will protect us at all times, whether we like it or not!

BTW I have the latest BIOS and can't switch off the Network Boot options in it. Hard Drive protection is not mentioned in it, that I can see.

All advice welcomed! Thanks.

[SHoTTa35]

didn't you post this in another place and they juts told ya to do a CLEAN install. XP wont boot in some cases when you change drives because the system is still trying to boot from the old drive.

I guess you can try the XP CD to repair the boot sector and that should update it with the new info for the new drive too.

[richk]

How did you clone the drive?

[masterus]

Hi

I believe that your SSD id SATA like most on the market , unles you made that SSD using special plate and 4 SD cards.

Regards,

[shoebox9]

Step 1)
I cloned the existing drive with a Arch...? (forget name), boot disk. I use this software to clone c:\ drives on my work-stations reasonably often, and it has always worked before. Like many people, I gave up on Norton Ghost several years back.

Step 2)

So I install XP SP2 onto the SSD in the standard drive slot,

The Transcend SSD is P-ATA an can be swapped into the standard notebook drive slot. They (and other P-ATA SSD's) are available from NewEgg. After swapping the drive in, I deleted the previously created partitions and used the XP install disk to create a fresh partition and install Win onto it.

Sorry I wan't very clear.

[p78]

I noticed that the transcend SSD drives had horrible reviews on amazon : http://www.amazon.com/Transcend-32GB-SS ... 1199835238

[shoebox9]

It probably took 1.5h to install XP.

I new the write times were slow before I bought it, but wasn't worried, as the primary use for this notebook was to be reading and critical study (ie searching) of a large technical library. Even SSDs with slow write times are still amazing at database searches due to their IO capabilites and 1ms access speed.

I really don't think the problem I've had is due to this particular SSD, but the fact that the T41 can't connect to the drive for it's head-parking-if-motion-detected feature.

BTW, the SSD would possibly work fine in the slim drive caddy as an extra drive, but I wanted it as a boot drive.

[chansonbleu]

Hi there,

I had the same idea as you, except I used a T42p (2373-HTU) and a 64GB SuperTalent IDE SSD drive. The process I used was as follows:

- Boot the stock machine from a BartPE bootable CD (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/).

- Create a Ghost image of the original HDD (both the IBM utility partition and the OS partition) on a network share.

- Once the Ghost process completed, I shut down the machine, removed the original HDD and installed the SSD drive.

- Boot from the BartPE CD again and restore the Ghost image to the SSD drive.

After performing these steps and rebooting the machine, I had similar symptoms to what you described - the boot process stopped with a blinking cursor in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. I eventually narrowed it down to a problem with a missing or incorrect MBR (Master Boot Record) on the SSD drive. While the Windows XP Recovery Console offers a utility called FIXMBR that will rewrite the MBR for you, using Recovery Console can be a real pain. I found a utility called MbrFix (http://www.sysint.no/nedlasting/mbrfix.htm) which will create a new MBR for you. It is a standalone utility that has no other dependencies, so you can boot your machine from a boot CD of your choice and run MbrFix from a USB drive or network share. Once the new MBR was created, I just restarted the machine and have since enjoyed working in near silence, with just a bit of fan noise. It was especially fun to pick up the machine while it was running and toss it across a table to a terrified engineer coworker...

Anyway, hope this helps!

Cheers,

Pete

[Johan]

I had the same idea as you, except I used a T42p (2373-HTU) and a 64GB SuperTalent IDE SSD drive.

Pete:

Thank you very much for sharing this very, very interesting information! It seems to me that there are surprisingly few threads about successfully using SSD's in T4x/p's, so what you are disclosing here is absolutely the pure, genuine GOLD!

I have been considering to get a SSD for my T42p (2373-Q1U) for a while, but after having "researched" quite a bit (= reading many user reviews here and there, tests, manufacturers specifications and so on), I am still uncertain with respect to the actual overall speed improvement, and - of course - if any particular (IDE/PATA) SSD will actually work in a T42p or not... as there are a good deal of users reporting BSOD's with SSD's now and then - and that I'd very much like to avoid!

It would be very useful to hear if you could compare the performance of your new 64 GB SuperTalent SSD (what specific model?) to what I guess you had before, a 7200 rpm HDD (am I correct in assuming this? If so, what HDD did you have - the original 7k60 Hitachi that initially came with your HTU?). I am not necessarily interested in "purely technical numbers" such as access times and peak data transfer data rate etc, but I am more interested in some sort of "human overall impression"; how does the SSD work and perform (speed, noise etc.) , compared to a standard 7200 rpm HDD? Did/do you e.g. note any remarkable speed improvement (boot time, program startup etc.) compared to with a mechanical HDD?

Finally: What are your recommendations with respect to a good, stable SSD for a T42p? Need not be a big 64 GB (still quite expensive these days, I'd guess!) less could do in my case - but I wouldn't want to go below 32 GB. What manufacturers would you "recommend", and which would you not - and any information about where to get the best deal?

Thanks in advance for also sharing your specific T42p SSD user-feedback... as they become available!

PS: I should note that I run Win XP SP2 on my T42p, and that's also what I'd like to run on a future, potential SSD (so, no Linux). I should also add that as I mainly use my T42p as a desktop replacement, and that my main focus is on getting a low-noise (or ideally a no-noise!) laptop, and that battery time is a bit less important. Any speed improvement is of course welcome, too!

Best regards,

Johan

[chansonbleu]

Hi Johan,

Glad to be of help! I definitely agree that the SSDs are a great improvement in terms of reduced noise, temperature, and especially removing the dependency on a fragile spinning platter, so although they are still quite expensive, the benefits are significant. I had a couple of additional insights as I was going through the process of getting the SSD working, which I’ll highlight below.

My overall goal for using the SSD with my T42p was to provide a resilient, sturdy platform for day to day technology consulting work, where the laptop is frequently in a bag getting bounced around. I also wanted to do as much as I could to minimize power consumption to max out battery life. I used a 9-cell battery and also installed an UltraBay battery to replace the optical drive, While I have not yet done comparisons of power consumption between the HDD and SSD, the two battery configuration should allow the machine to run for about 6+ hours straight, and I’m hoping that the SSD’s smaller power footprint may extend this time even further.

The specific SSD that I have is a Super Talent 64GB IDE 2.5” Flash Drive (model FHD64GB25M). The first thing I noticed about this drive is that it is a VERY tight fit in the drive bay of a T42p (2373-HTU). I was originally planning to use the drive tray that fits under the stock HDD, but the clearances were so small that I wound up just installing the bare SSD with the bezel attached to the front. Even by itself, the fit was tight enough that the two warranty stickers on the top of the drive were scraped off just by inserting and removing the drive a couple of times. However, the drive itself is very sturdy and seems none the worse for wear.

As I mentioned above, once I rewrote the MBR and got the drive to boot my restored Ghost image of Windows XP (about 30 GB in total size), I immediately started playing around with benchmarks to see the improved performance over the HDD. Disk intensive operations such as recursive directory searches were noticeably faster and in some cases returned results almost instantaneously. XP SP2 as a whole did not blow me away with a huge performance increase over my original 7200 RPM drive. While I definitely felt the SSD was quicker, profiles still took a while to load, and the usual office automation tasks (Word 2003, IE 7, Firefox 2.x) felt pretty normal overall. What I suspect is that since the underlying disk is definitely performing faster, it should be possible to tune XP to take advantage of this (such as increasing the size of the swap partition or applying registry tweaks) and gain some additional performance benefits this way.

The one major downside to the SSD was the cost (just over $2000 US). While I freely admit I probably overpaid a bit for mine because I needed the 64GB of space for work, I still think that this even $1000 for a 32GB is way too expensive to be practical. Although I still plan on using the SSD on my main T42p work machine, I have another T42p that I plan to use as a test bed for compact flash storage testing. This thread goes into a lot of detail on the subject: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... torder=asc. I am thinking about using a CF IDE adapter plus one or two CF PCMCIA adapters. If you used 16 GB CF cards and populated all the available slots, you would have over 40 GB of storage onboard for way less money than a 32GB SSD. I think you could even configure the CF PCMCIA drives as partitions in a dynamic disk in XP to provide access via a single drive letter. Anyway, once I get this configuration set up on the second machine, I’ll run some performance tests against both machines and see how CF performs against SSD. More to come!

Cheers,

Pete

[p78]

Very Interesting information Thx !

By the way I am wondering if anybody tried one 1.8" IDE drive with an Addonics 1.8" to 2.5" adapter in a T4X ??

The 1.8" 32GB SSD samsung drives are quite "cheap" right now ($314 at newegg : http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... ht=#374195 )

[Johan]

Wow, Pete, absolutely amazing repository of very valuable knowledge you possess AND share!! THANKS, all wonderful and highly interesting, except... you know, eeehm... well, the for a few people probably "slightly prohibitive" pricing!

But, hey! I have an outstanding offer for you! What if, say, you want to upgrade your (I mean, really small, oldfashioned, outdated, USED!!) 64 GB SSD to a larger and more impressive... 128 GB, or why not simply 256 GB now while we're at it, then I offer to but your (old, used...) 64 GB for... well, I won't cheat at you, so I offer USD 20 (yes, really: Twenty good, green dollars!!) So, do we have a deal??

... or should I rather start saving, is that what you're saying? Ooh, well... but my offer stands!

Anyway, more serious, presently prohibitive pricing or not, all the SSD benefits are obvious, and your additional suggestions about getting one or two far cheaper flash-cards and use in/with miniPCI (Cardbus) adaptors together with a smaller (cheaper), bootable "main" SSD is also absolutely worth considering... I really need to do more research here, that's obvious!

As to your comments about the somewhat absent (Win XP) "speed boost" this confirm what I have already hear/read elsewhere, but I think you have a good idea - that it ought to be possible to be tweaked though changing the swap file size and/or other tweaks. The one benefit, in any case, is the no-noise operation... this must really be wonderful!

Final question (for now!): You mention that the drive is very "tight" (and wont allow for the HDD caddy), so what I wonder is this: How hot does your palm rest feel now, with the SSD, compared to previously when using your mechanical HDD? I mean, usually I can feel a slight amount of heat on my palm rest, just above where the HDD is located. FYI, I have a ST910021A = 100 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.1 which according to the datasheet has a power consumption of 2.6 W (Seek) or 2.2 W (Read/Write) or 1.3/.26 W (Idle/Standby). According to a recent review: Solid State Drives: Fast, Rugged, and Really Expensive the 32 GB version of the SSD you've got (?) consume 1 W, but I don't know if that also hold for the 64 GB version, and I have no idea if the SSD has any "sleep mode", so the 1 W might be "peak" and not average?

Again: Thanks for sharing, Pete - please keep us updated!

Best regards,

Johan