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PATA Ultrabay adapter in T61 with Middleton bios

Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2014 5:31 pm
by JBUK
Whilst doing some Crystal Disk Marking and getting slow results for a SATA11 Thinkpad I decided to try a pata drive in the ultrabay to check the performance of that disk compared with the previous benchmarks.
I have 3 pata ultrabay adapters (ubays), 1 IBM and 2 knockoffs. The genuine ubay always works, one of the sino ubays has never worked, I always get an error on boot : unable to initialize the disk in the Ultrabay. The other sino ubay usually works but sometimes gives the same initialize error.
I decided to persevere with the intermittent ubay, bad decision. The HDD a Samsung HM160HC from a T23 had a password and I tried to boot up with and without AHCI bios enabled, eventually when I succeeded to get it initialized and booted I noticed that the disk showed up in HDtune as a WAMSUNG followed by a model number that was mostly kind of $ signs. But I was able to run benchmarking.
I think I then took it out and tried an SSD for comparison. Later I retried the Wamsung HDD but when I got the password prompt up I was unable to boot because it no longer recognized my correctly entered password. !!!**FFdd.

Trying it back in its home T23 the HDD password no longer worked either. How this can happen I cannot imagine as I thought that it was only the bios which could read and write the password and simply confirming the password does not change anything, or so I thought. So I am left with a bricked 160GB disk now thanks to a cheap copy ultrabay slim adapter. Beware all such adapters in case they corrupt your HDD password too.