T43 won't boot from esata enclosure external hdd

[milokat]

Hi guys,

I'm having some problem with getting my T43 to boot from my external hdd connected via esata expresscard & esata hdd enclosure. Internal PATA HDD still attached to the t43.

External HDD: Western Digital 250GB SATA drive
Enclosure: esata, connected to laptop via expresscard/34, powered by additional USB plugged to the laptop.
OS: Win XP SP3

I'm pretty sure that the card is working and installation of the driver was done properly (as it's showing up in device manager under scsi and raid controller), as i'm able to use the hdd when in windows (read and write), and the lights on the expresscard blinks. What I've done so far is to clone the internal hdd to the external esata hdd (using Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools), set boot order in bios to boot from usb hdd first (is this the correct method?) and it's still not working.

Need some great advise on where to start the troubleshooting. Cloning problem? Thinkpad's bios not supporting esata?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[basketb]

As far as I know, it doesn't work for the T6x series because of lacking BIOS support. I would assume the same is true for the T4x series.

[sjthinkpader]

When cloning a drive in a T43, the new drive must be in the HDD slot before it will be formatted properly. This has something to do with the PATA/SATA converter in the T43.

Since SATA drives cannot be formatted in the HDD slot, it may not have the proper format needed by the T43.

T43 will boot from an properly formatted external drive from an USB port. Expresscard adapters normally are treated like an USB port.

I haven't tired to format a SATA disk with Recovery disk yet. May be that process can product a bootable SATA disk on the T43.

[milokat]

basketb & sjthinkpader,

Thanks for the great advise. I'll try to get the HDD properly formatted before trying it again and advise results when done.
Cheers

[milokat]

My T43 now successfully boots to winxp from the esata external hdd and it's still running beautifully now.

Thank you sjthinkpadder for the great advise, you've pointed me to the right solution.

I did a simple NTFS quick format of the esata hdd, physical 1:1 cloned my primary c: pata drive to it (using hdclone bootable cd dos version - cloned everything including the hidden 4GB FAT32 IBM systems partition that contains the system files equivalent to the recovery files), changed boot sequence to esata during restart, and voila! (and all this with the esata external hdd connected and recognised through the esata expresscard in dos and windows). Did some minor adjustment with easeus partition software and got what i wanted.

Thanks again!

[basketb]

Congrats on getting this to work. What kind of throughput do you get from the esata drive? Could you run HDTach or HDTune and report the numbers?

[milokat]

Here goes (long bench test results):

esata (WD Element 250GB) - Burst: 234.4MB/s, Random: 17.4ms, Avg read: 46.4MB/s
primary internal hdd (Hitachi 80GB)- Burst: 95.6MB/s, Random: 16.5ms, Avg read: 29.8MB/s
usb hdd sata (Seagate 500GB) - Burst: 32.9MB/s, Random: 18.6ms, Avg read: 32.7MB/s

I guess this is not bad for the ole T43, but i've read that esata can go up to 3Gbps, any suggestion for tweaks to improve the throughput?

[FTC]

milokat, 234.5 MB/s translates to 1.9Gbps, which is quite in line with the max. effective burst throughput you are ging to get oover the 3Gbps link once discounted the interface overhead. Besides, this is much more than what is needed to serve a disk which can only transfer an average 29.8Mbs to/from the platters.. so my suggestion is that you just enjoy what you have... seems well tuned to me.

[cksim]

Hi milokat,

May I know what is the eSATA expresscard that you are using ?

I believe the eSATA expresscard that you have supports booting from external eSATA HDD, am I correct ?

Thank you.

Sim CK