Thinkpad T22 and Compact Flash -- weird issue

[keenmaster486]

I just got a Thinkpad T22 to play around with. It had its original hard drive with a working install of Windows XP in it.

Now, I am trying to replace the hard drive with a compact flash card using an adapter.

This is something I have done many times before with many different Thinkpads. Sometimes I have to install a drive overlay -- shouldn't have to do that here. The T22 doesn't have the same BIOS hard drive capacity limitations that 90's machines do.

I'm trying two cards: one 16 GB and one 128 GB. Both of them work fine in other machines, including a 600E and a T41. Both of them read and write fine in my modern computer.

Both of them exhibit the same strange behavior in this particular T22, namely, that they seem to work fine (I can see them and verify full capacity) if zeroed out with a brand new empty partition table (using GParted), but as soon as I create at least one partition (with any tool, whether in the laptop or out of it), the laptop wigs out and will not boot from anything. A DOS floppy or CD will begin booting, but then hang before completion, making it impossible to do anything with the laptop, create more partitions, or format the partition(s) that were created.

Has anyone encountered this before? I spent several hours trying to fix this last night.

It's not the adapter. I tried two different adapters and both of them work fine with those same CF cards (and others) in other laptops.

It can't be the card capacity since it happens with both the 16 GB card and the 128 GB card.

I'm stumped, so I hope someone has an answer for me.