T41 issue: repalcement hard drive not found by ROM or OS

[bla00109]

Hi, I have a T41 that I've used happily for years. My T41 is my 2nd notebook that I done surgery on . I upgraded the CPU to a Pentium M 2.0Ghz SL7EM (Merom processor) and made sure to use the silver heatsink paste. Also upgrade BIOS to the lastest ver. 3.23. It ran very nicely for about a week.

Then the original 40 Gb Hitachi OEM drive failed and the unit refused to boot. I bought a Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD800BEVE 80GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" PATA drive and have carefully installed it ( label side down, used drive caddy), pins seem to align and hole in caddy aligns with case hole perfectly. I can't get my ROM to even find a hard drive. Windows XP will not install because it cant' find a HD. Ununtu install disk will not install because it can't find a hard drive.

I don't seen any jumpers. According to Western Digital site

http://support.wdc.com/images/kb/scorpio_jumpers.jpg

If there is no attached jumpers (my setup), it should be recognized as Master, as my optical drive is secondary (shows up as secondary in ROM). There is no IDE cable as the socket that I disconnected as I think the IDE connection is soldered to the main board.

What should I do to get it to recognize my new WD drive? (Seriiously thinking of parting the dead thing out on Ebay and buying a P940 based laptop on Newegg for $350)

Thanks, David

[andy2000]

There should be no issue with using that drive in a T41. It should just work. Can you hear the drive spin up? Double check that the pins are lining up. It's very easy to install it so that only one row of pins makes contact. Make sure the bottom of the drive (circuit board side) is flat against the palm rest.

[bla00109]

No that didn't work. I re-inserted it with laptop upside down and drive slips in effortless to the correct position. Computer still can't find a hard drive.

I'm going to try removing the optical drive and reboot.

David

[andy2000]

In that case, the drive must be defective.

[richk]

or the motherboard

[Microspeed]

Either Andy or Rich are most likely correct.
That said let me tell you a story about my T41. I was upgrading the drive to a larger 320. So I swapped the drives. Tried the OS install and like your's the lappy didn't see it. Removed the new drive and tested it with a usb box. It worked fine. ??? Reinstalled the old drive and it worked. Reinstalled the 320 drive again. It still didnt work??? Tried to install it without the metal cage. Bingo! It worked!!
Removed it again, this time with the cage, but the 2 tabs on the end of the cage I bent out just a tiny bit. (Maybe 5 degrees) This allowed the drive to seat completely in the socket; or at least that was the idea. The drive worked when I put it back in and still does now a couple years latter. Like I said, Andy or Rich are probably correct, but It might be worth ur time to try bending the tabs a tiny bit.
Good Luck

[bla00109]

Thanks Microspeed, I;ll try it. This is now the second WD scorpio drive Ive tried. Think the IDE connection is bad, becaue the controller still recognizes the optical drive in 2nd position.
David

[RealBlackStuff]

Remove keyboard, palmrest and wifi card.
Reattach the keyboard.
Now put pressure on the big Intel chip that sits under the wifi card, and try to boot up with your hard disk in.
Try different corners of that chip.
If it now works, your Southbridge (the Intel chip mentioned) needs reballing.

[bla00109]

Agree, this is probably the motherboard or the connection to the IDE interface for the HDD.

I tried booting with pressure on South bridge as you suggested. No go.

What is reballing?

Thanks, David

[bla00109]

Does it make any sense at all to consider replacing the motherboard in this T41.

For about $350, I can get a Windows 7 Prof. B940 laptop - either Asus or Lenovo???

Thanks for any suggestions.

David

[RealBlackStuff]

For less than $100.- you get an as-new motherboard.
Reballing is replacing the solder balls (BGA) of the Southbridge (or GPU) chip with fresh ones and properly resoldering it all back, using specialized infrared equipment.
See this: http://reflowrepairs.co.uk/videos/index.php

[mnowell69]

i had exactly the same problem on my T41, it would only recognise certain drives. The drives weren't reaching the ide connector. if i removed the drive caddy, the drives worked every time. This was causing all sorts of havoc with my T41 before i found the problem, for example the screen would go black if i leaned on the palmrest too hard or if i moved the laptop in a certain way. I now use a travelstar 60gb which was in my T43 and i have no problems whatsoever.

[bla00109]

Thanks for you input. I did try putting in the driive without a caddy and I made sure it plugged in by turning the laptop upside down. This didn't work either. I think the IDE connector is bad.

I bought an ASUS laptop with 4 Gb , a B940 processor and Windows Prof. for $350. It makes very little sense wasting any more time with such old technology. I'll probably part out the T41 and the new(used) Pentium M 2 Ghz processor I put in it.
David

[mnowell69]

that's a pity because if you were in the UK i would have bought it.