Hard drive upgrade problem on t30

[jeff_hammond944]

About three months ago, we upgraded the hard drive on my son's t30 with a WD Scorpio 250GB unit. It has been working fine until recently. Now it does not boot, all we get is a flashing cursor. We upgraded the BIOS and controller program, no change. The BIOS utility recognizes the hard drive as the correct model, it just doesn't boot. How can we overcome this problem?

[Harryc]

Welcome to the thinkpads.com forum.
Run the Western Digital Data Lifeguard diagnostics on it. If it is that new it is certainly still under warranty from WD.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... 01&lang=en

[craigmontHunter]

If it is under warrenty (it should be) send it to WD, and they have fairly good turnaround times, but they will probably send you a refurb - that is what I got. So far no complaints, but than I have only been using it for 2 weeks since I got my t41 back

Jack

[jeff_hammond944]

I thought about that, but I had a friend check out the drive at work, and he was able to read the file structure and use it for a boot drive on a newer machine. That leads me to think that it is not a drive problem.

[emeraldgirl08]

I wonder if it's your Master Boot Record. There is an ISO you could burn to CD for that to repair the MBR. I also am wondering if you have a Linux disc by any chance. That operating system is bootable by CD and allows you to look inside Windows if you will.

The only time I saw a blinking cursor on start-up was when I disassembled my T30 for maintenance. It took awhile for the system to catch up and load my HDD.

Good luck.

[cparker]

I would still run the diagnostics. It still could be a drive problem. You could install a new OS on it and it might boot fine now, but it might fail again later if the drive is faulty. If you old drive still boots without a problem (assuming you still have it) I would send it back to WD or at least talk to them.