[SOLVED] T42p won't boot from SATA drive in the UB adapter

[voxano]

Hi,

My t42p won't boot from SATA drive in the ultrabay caddy. I'm hoping to use it as an internal backup and extra storage drive. I've created Recovery Media with ThinkVantage 4.23 on the HDD and then choose to boot from this HDD with F12. Although the media appears to be created successfully, it won't boot on the restart: just a blinking cursor in the left top corner.

It boots if I use IDE drive (and caddy), but not with the SATA drive (and caddy). Otherwise the SATA drive appears to work just fine using the caddy. When I browse through the SATA drive, the boot structure looks just like the boot structure on the IDE drive.

I've tried two different SATA caddies and two different SATA drives to no avail.

The machine is 2373C96 with 1RETDRWW (3.23) BIOS.
Is it possible to boot (the ThinkVantage 4.23 Recovery Media)
from the SATA caddy on this thinkpad? Perhaps there is
such a thing as "bootable" and "not-bootable" SATA caddy?
Will getting a "bootable SATA caddy" solve the problem?

Any ideas how to resolve this?

Thanks,
voxano

[emtee3511]

Is it possible you need to configure the bay hdd in bios under compatibility mode? I'm not sure about your T41p, but maybe your SATA needs ACHI or compatibility as opposed to ide mode?

[RealBlackStuff]

If you remove the internal IDE/PATA HD, you should be able to boot from the Ultrabay device.
The SATA disk is probably also configured as C:, which clashes with the PATA drive.

[voxano]

Thanks for the comments.

Is it possible you need to configure the bay hdd in bios under compatibility mode? I'm not sure about your T41p, but maybe your SATA needs ACHI or compatibility as opposed to ide mode?

I don't see any options in the BIOS of my T42p related to a "compatibility mode". The SATA drive is in a generic "SATA_to_IDE" ultrabay enclosure and is seen as an IDE by the system after F12. Perhaps you can be a bit more specific about your suggestion. Thanks.

If you remove the internal IDE/PATA HD, you should be able to boot from the Ultrabay device.
The SATA disk is probably also configured as C:, which clashes with the PATA drive.

I didn't mention that I've tried that already to no avail. BTW, my SATA is configured as D:
My laptop runs normally with both drives [C: PATA and D: SATA] at the same time.
Also, I do need to have the primary drive in, because that is where I would recover the backed up system after HOPEFULLY booting from the SATA in the caddy.

Perhaps I should also mention that I do have a workaround. I can create the ThinkVantage 4.23 "Rescue and Recovery Startup Disk" on a CD. Then boot from an external CDROM to restore the entire system onto a blank primary C: HDD using the backup from the D: SATA sitting in the caddy. This works fine, but it seems awkward to resort to/relay upon an additional CD, when the "backup SATA drive" itself has all the same sofware and is bootable, in principle. It seems to me that the entire recovery could be potentially done within the laptop itself using just the caddy...

Any other comments or suggestions? Thanks.

[ajkula66]

How did you install the OS on that SATA drive?

[emtee3511]

"The SATA drive is in a generic "SATA_to_IDE" ultrabay enclosure and is seen as an IDE by the system after F12. Perhaps you can be a bit more specific about your suggestion."

If you go into Bios -- Config -- Serial SATA(I guess that would be IDE for you)
Do you find a choice for either IDE or Compatability?

Some of my Thinkpads use ACHI, but at least one (my X200) only wants Compatability -- I think it has to do with the type of HDD or SSD I have installed, but I'm not really sure -- but after reading your post, I went into Bios on my X200 and tried to change the Config/Serial SATA (my drive) to ACHI, which most of my other SSD's use -- when I changed it on this X200 with a Kingston 160gb SSD, it gave me the same symptoms you are describing and would not boot -- it wanted me to repair Windows -- so I went back into Bios and changed back to Compatability mode and all is now good -- May not have anything to do with your symptoms -- I'm just giving a best guess

[voxano]

How did you install the OS on that SATA drive?

By using the ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery [RR]: I chose "Second hard drive" as the backup location and then RR made it bootable and copied minimal OS and the required RR tools there before running the actual backup for the first time. The same thing happens when I create the "RR Startup Disk" on a CDROM and I used exactly the same steps for an IDE drive in its caddy, which, as I mentioned earlier, boots fine. Thanks.

[voxano]

"The SATA drive is in a generic "SATA_to_IDE" ultrabay enclosure and is seen as an IDE by the system after F12. Perhaps you can be a bit more specific about your suggestion."

If you go into Bios -- Config -- Serial SATA(I guess that would be IDE for you)
Do you find a choice for either IDE or Compatability?

Some of my Thinkpads use ACHI, but at least one (my X200) only wants Compatability -- I think it has to do with the type of HDD or SSD I have installed, but I'm not really sure -- but after reading your post, I went into Bios on my X200 and tried to change the Config/Serial SATA (my drive) to ACHI, which most of my other SSD's use -- when I changed it on this X200 with a Kingston 160gb SSD, it gave me the same symptoms you are describing and would not boot -- it wanted me to repair Windows -- so I went back into Bios and changed back to Compatability mode and all is now good -- May not have anything to do with your symptoms -- I'm just giving a best guess

Thanks again. The Config in my BIOS offers PCI, USB etc, but not IDE or anything related to the HDDs. The Boot from Startup shows both drives as IDE, but no options related to "compatibility" seem to be present anywhere. Thanks for trying to help and for running the tests, but it appears that my BIOS just assumes IDE and doesn't offer any modification options...

[RealBlackStuff]

@emtee3511:
Only laptops that have standard (HD-drivebay) SATA drives, have the AHCI/Compatibility option in BIOS (from T60 upwards).

@voxano:
Actually you have an IDE_TO_SATA Ultrabay adapter. UB has IDE (=PATA) signals, which are converted inside the adapter to SATA.

You need to do away with that crap R&R, and get Acronis True Image.
And then reinstall an OS on the UB-SATA hD, using a different (Windows or Linux) CD.
That will modify the boot.ini file on your C-drive, and give you the menu OS-choice at boot time.

[ajkula66]

The only way I was able to create a bootable SATA drive to use in my T43p's Ultrabay was:

a) Remove the "main" hard drive.

b) Install the OS from an external media drive on the SATA drive when inserted in Ultrabay.

c) Put the "main" HD back in and choose which one to boot from on startup.

My $0.02 only...YMMV

[emtee3511]

RBS - "Only laptops that have standard (HD-drivebay) SATA drives, have the AHCI/Compatability option in BIOS (from T60 upwards)."
So is that why my X machines without Ultrabase attached won't boot ACHI/only boot Compatability? What is my machine missing in not using ACHI -- speed?

Edit: One of my X200's uses ACHI, and the other X200 won't boot except in Compatability???? I really don't get it..

[voxano]

Thanks again for the comments and suggestions.

I succeeded in booting from the UB SATA drive. I did it by first creating the ThinkVantage "RNR Media" on UB SATA drive and only then running the RNR to do the full backup of the system in the primary drive while storing the backups on the UB SATA drive. I then can reboot from the UB SATA drive to restore the entire system onto a blank PATA drive in the primary slot.
So this works, nice and simple.

It turns out that, although running the backup right away does create the RNR media on the HDD, it does so with the default flag "Don't remove existing data" checked and doesn't offer any choice in an obvious way. For whatever reason, this worked fine for my UB IDE/PATA drive, but not for the UB SATA drive. Making the "RNR media" first allows to "uncheck" that option, and that apparently makes the UB SATA drive actually bootable, too.

Now, perhaps I misunderstand the suggestions about installing the OS directly to the UP drive, but I imagine that if one wanted to run the system from the UB drive, one could install it there and then use the primary slot for additional PATA type storage. That isn't my goal though at the moment. I'd like to keep the system on the primary drive and use the UB SATA for the additional storage and for keeping the backups. That way I'm free to use CD/DVDROM in UB if needed without resorting to external devices. The only reason I want to be able to boot from the UB drive is in order to restore my system from the backup without any external devices.

Any specific reasons for negative attitude towards the ThinkVantage RNR? I just started using it, so it would be good to know if there are some problems to be expected down the road. Perhaps I should switch. I wasn't impressed with earlier versions myself, so I never even tried to use them, but the 4.23 seems to offer all the options that I need and it worked fine so far (although, it took a bit of research to locate proper documentation): I was able to backup and restore the entire system several times by now. In fact I'm typing this from a freshly restored system, because installing "Acronis Backup and Security 2011" evidently killed my WinXP installation... twice. [ This last problem may be something trivial though http://forum.acronis.com/forum/19204 ]

Thanks.