FIXED: T42P no hard drive found

[brian183]

I just bought a used T42P. When I bought it, it was working fine. It was running windows XP and everything was AOK. I then tried to swap out the HDD with another HDD that I wasn't sure worked anymore but wanted to double check because it's a bigger drive then the one already in the T42P. First boot, the new HDD was not recognized at all. I figured it was a bad HDD so I put the original drive back into the T42P. Second boot, the original drive is not recognized at all. I tried clearing the cmos, re-seating, cleaned out the HDD bay, I upgraded the BIOS to 3.23. Still the original HDD was not recognized.

So then I grabbed an old 40GB drive out of a T22 and put it into the T42P. STILL no HDD detected!! I then booted into a ubuntu livecd to make sure at least my IDE controller was getting recognized. After a quick lspci I could tell the IDE controller is recognized. Was it possible that all 3 drives somehow broke through all of this?

At this point I'm getting desperate so I went to Fry's and got a Brand New HDD and STILL! nothing.

Did I essentially brick my newly acquired T42P? What else can I try to resolve this problem? Is there some voodoo dance the T42P requires to recognize hard drives?

Thanks for the help.


**EDIT**

Shortly after posting this I looked at how I was inserting the drive. Yeah ... upside down the whole time. So the drive I originally tried definitely does not work. The new drive I just bought works fine. Feel free to make fun of me. HAH!

[rkawakami]

Well, despite that, I'll still Welcome you to thinkpads.com!

Never attempted to install a hard drive "right side up" in my T4x systems. I would have thought that it would be impossible to do so with the way that the pins are keyed.

[mgo]

Shortly after posting this I looked at how I was inserting the drive. Yeah ... upside down the whole time. So the drive I originally tried definitely does not work. The new drive I just bought works fine. Feel free to make fun of me. HAH!

Don't feel bad. The other day I spent several minutes looking for my pajama bottoms, and then realized I was WEARING them!!

(industrial strength senior moment!!)

Oh and by the way, I always make sure I use a piece of paper or similar material to insulate the circuitry from the Ultra Bay, when using the drive in the Ultra Bay.