t30 hdd trouble,willwork with just one.

[tibus999]

Hi to everybody,
i am new to the forum,
i have three thinkpad t30,
if i remove the hdd from the first and swap it to the other two,
no problem,all of three will work well,
every new hdd i will put in all of three is not recon at all from the system,
bios is updated,
firmware for hdd says that will not found any hdd
startup with diagnostic will not see any hdd,
all three will not work also with original ibm hdd p/n 19k1692 toshiba 40gb
any idea?
many thank's,
Tiberio.

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the forum.
Those new hard drives have to be INITIALIZED first before they can be formatted.
Get a USB cage for those PATA drives, put it in there, then connect to one of your T30 machines.
Click on Start/Run, type in: diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter
Find that new HD (Disk 1), rightclick on the word Disk 1 and select Initialize.
You can now format it is well.

[tibus999]

Thank's RealBlackStuff for the answer,
but it isn't the trouble,
the hdd are well working,initialized and formatted,
one of them have win-xp pro on it,if i swap it between the tree,all is working,
if i fit any hdd formatted and working into them,none of them will be recon from the hardware,
all of this come after i have updated the bios to the last one,from ibm website,
the green icon for the hdd is always and always on,
when is working with the one good, the light come on only when it read on the hdd,
thank's
Tiberio.

[RealBlackStuff]

T30 HDs that have been formatted in another (non-Thinkpad) machine, will not work.
They MUST be formatted in/by a T30.

[tibus999]

Ok,.....
done......
still not seen from the machines...odd...
always green light of the hdd always on,
all working,boot from cd correct,
then,he say no hd present in the system
it's make me crazy...

[RealBlackStuff]

Please give us exact make and model of the hard disks you are trying and that don't work.

[tibus999]

Hallo,
the non working hdd are seagate
model ST94011A 40 gb,
could be of any help?
thank's tiberio.

[RealBlackStuff]

I'm not surprised, those drives are 10 years old!
Get something newer from e.g. Samsung or WD or Hitachi.

[cadillacmike68]

It is quite possible the the 2 old Seagates just up and died, either from an electronics failure, actuator arm failure of getting track 0 messed up. Or something else.

Try getting a different HDD as RBS suggested. If you want, you can try the Seagates in a different computer or in the T30 Ultrabay if you have the tray. They should show up if they are working.

I have Lots of HDDs from 20GB to 750GB, but am in the US, so shipping one would cost a little.

PM me if you can't find a suitable working drive.

[precip9]

Some drives had compatibility issues in the way "drive select" was implemented. I have seen this with Western Digital, but not with Seagate. But it is not impossible. If that is the problem, the only choice is to use the Seagates somewhere else.

[T30alive]

I have a WD320GB PATA that only works with partitions of about 108 GB each. If the partition size is too big the drive will not be found.

I also have a 1 TB drive in my ultrabay SATA adaptor that works without these partitions. 1.320 TB is a lot of storage for a T30, but it works fine.