New to this forum and very grateful for the immense knowledge of participants.
It is typical for a newcomer to pop a question first, but I am happy to be a solution-as-first-post person.
Although, the solution I have is just "be patient". it pays.
I have a T43 1871 for which I just bought a new 2nd HDD ultraslim bay. I placed my old T23 (Real TP fan here !!!!) 40GB Toshiba HDD and placed it in. It could not be identified.
At first I thought the bay only support SATA and not IDE but could not find any mentioning about it in the spec. (FRU 62P4553).
While searching for a solution on this forum I decided to do a firmware upgrade for my main HDD with the ISO disk as described by few posts. (http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 62282.html)
As I used my CD drive for the upgrade, I could not do it to the 2nd HDD.
After a while I placed the 2nd HDD again into bay and as I could see no reaction, and it did not show up in device manager, I simply forgot about it.
About 10(!!!) minutes later the autoplay window has shown up - scanning my 2nd HD.
I do not know if the firmware update has done the trick or not, but here is my friendly tip of the day: sometimes, all laptops need is a bit of time for themselves and they will cure miraculously.
(As a kid I had an old Snoopy cartoon saying: time cures everything except a hook, apparently it is also true for HDD)
Thanks for your patience with this long message.




