T43 Cannot see any Hard Drives

[MurrayShafiroff]

Have a T43 that I just picked up. Everything works fine, except the BIOS does not recognize any hard drives.
Tried 5 different known good Thinkpad drives. Recognizes none of them.
DVD/CD-RW is good (can boot from Live CD Ubuntu). Just sees no hard drive.

Tried removing the system battery and the CMOS battery, did nothing.
Running latest version of BIOS & EC (1.29 / 1.06).

Short of just a damaged board, does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance
Murray

[Neil]

Do you have those drives in a caddy with all four screws? If not, the pins are probably not all making contact with the socket. That's my guess, anyway.

[GomJabbar]

As Neil said. Try holding the T43 upside down while plugging in the hard drive. You need to make sure the pins line up correctly.

Possibly you need to change the BIOS setting from ACHI to Compatibility mode (just a guess).

[Mike Blake]

(can boot from Live CD Ubuntu). Just sees no hard drive

Could Ubuntu utilities see an unformatted, unpartitioned HD0, perhaps? Had something similar and only Windows could see absolutely nothing.

[RealBlackStuff]

No AHCI/Compat option in a T43 (these are PATA machines).
Just remember that the HD goes in upside-down (label pointing to the laptop-bottom).

[ajkula66]

GomJabbar wrote:

Possibly you need to change the BIOS setting from ACHI to Compatibility mode (just a guess).

No such option on T43 or any other pre-SATA ThinkPad.

Agreed with everything else previously stated.

To OP, make sure that you're using a correct HD cover for the screen size, they are different between 14" and 15" models.

[GomJabbar]

No such option on T43 or any other pre-SATA ThinkPad.

I thought it might since it has the SATA to PATA bridge. My bad.

[Bibin]

1) The pins aren't properly being plugged into the socket

2) Without the correct caddy the HDD's logic board is making contact with the metal HDD cage, putting it on the fritz

3) Your IDE connection is damaged, not too uncommon with the spring-loaded T4x series IDE connector

Options include installing the HDD with the laptop upside-down as others have suggested to try to eliminate possibility #1, use some sort of electrical tape to prevent #2, and try to reflow the IDE connector solder points on the bottom of the motherboard carefully with a soldering iron in case there is a cold joint causing issues, which is an unlikely but possible cause of possibility #3.

You could also follow the link in my signature to install a modern Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk instead of the IDE kind supported by a stock T43/p.