Installing New Hard Drive T43p 2669

[Wildcat_44]

Hello-
My Hard drive recently crashed and I am attempting in vain to get a new one installed in my T43P Thinkpad. I purchased a Western Digital 320 G drive and have purchased the Rescue and recovery cd's. When I try to Install to the factory state, becasuse I dont have a backup to restore, it begins to format the hard drive and I get the following error "internal error has occurred canot complete process" or something along those lines. The process ends and the is the end of that. I desperately need to get an operating system on this machine. Any assistance that can be provided would be helpful.

Thanks

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the Forum.
When you boot, and immediately press F12, do you 'see' your hard disk in the boot-menu?
Did you remember to put the caddy on the hard disk, and turn it upside down (label towards the bottom of the laptop) before inserting?

[Wildcat_44]

I do see it in the boot menu. I should have put that in the initial post. It definitely regognizes that there is a hard drive present.

[Neil]

Any one of the following could be your problem:

1 Misaligned hard drive (see RBS post above, and I will add, include 4 screws)
2 Bad install media - either OEM or CD-R disks can be bad
3 Faulty optical drive
4 Faulty HDD. I know it's new but still a possibility.
5 Faulty RAM
6 Motherboard faults

You are going to have to do some detective work, and isolate the defect through the process of elimination.

[killer]

If you can use a friend's machine to download PC Doctor for DOS (bootable version) from the Lenovo website, and write it to CD, then you can do all sorts of diagnostics from DOS. This might give you a fighting chance of finding the cause of the problem. I hope this helps.

[MnR]

Hi,

With all of the possibilities that have been given you thefirst thing I would do is clean you DVD Drive. Then Make sure that your Hard Drive is mounted fully with all four(4) screws in place.

If this does still does not let you load the recovery, Then I would test the Hard Drive Also on another computer see if you can browse the recovery disks.

Just some thoughts for you to try.

MnR