Thinkpads Forum

Help using a 1 TB HDD in T61 – is it an AHCI driver issue?

I have a trusty Thinkpad T61 that was built in August 1997. It came with Win XP and a 100 GB hard drive.
Some years later, I bought a 320 GB drive, and did a clean install of Win 7. That has been working pretty well for a long time, and of course I kept it up to date with Microsoft’s many patches.
Now, Windows Update has stopped working and the deadline for Win 10 is looming, so I thought I would get ready for Windows 10, by doing the following.

1. Bought a brand new 1 Terabyte HGST HDD.
2. Cloned the 320 GB to the new 1 TB drive using an external HDD dock connected by USB, using AOMEI Backupper software.

Well, that went smoothly, with no apparent errors. The old drive was partitioned into a C, D, E drive of roughly 100 GB each; the new drive also has C, D, E disks of roughly 300 GB each.

However, when I swap out the old and the new drive, the new one behaves erratically. The system seems slower, Windows Update gives an error message that I have never seen before, some web sites will not load.
After reading in various online forums about “Intel Rapid Storage Driver”, I wonder if my IDE drivers are too old to handle the 1 TB unit.

Here is what I see in Device Manager:

IDE/ATA ATAPI controllers
- ATA Channel 0
- Intel ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Controllers 2850
- Intel ICH8M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller

When I click Properties and then the Driver tab, I can find the version number for each of those entries.

The first two are provided by Microsoft, dated 6/21/2006, version 6.1.7601.18231
and the
third one (SATA AHCI) is provided by Intel, dated 8/7/2009, version 8.9.2.1002

I would appreciate advice from anyone in this great forum who has been down this path and successfully installed a 1 TB HDD in an older Thinkpad running Windows 7.
Thank you!

Not sure whether this is any help, but nonetheless:

- have you set the HDD to be "AHCI" (and not "Compatibility") in the BIOS?

- try see the thread Intel Storage Driver, compatibility issues?... maybe of relevance?

- Intel has a "Driver Update Utility" which may perhaps be useful; see Intel Driver Update Utility.

acz wrote:Now, Windows Update has stopped working...

What? Windows Update should certainly still work for Windows 7! You may however be troubled by Microsoft apparently having reduced the priority for Windows 7-updates; see e.g. W7/SP1 Windows Update stuck checking for updates and many similar threads on the internet.

Johan

If you are still stuck, go get a cheap 160-300 GB drive and restore to that. Or find your old 100GB drive and restore to that. You can always figure out the 1TB drive's issues later.

I have two of those 1TB HGST drives, but I don't use them as boot drives, they are my D: drives for storing backups and movies, etc. You do have to have ACHI on as Johan noted, and win 7 updates are slow.


T61 from 1997? must have been a typo.

Sounds like the typical issue of cloning an existing windows installation from a regular to an advanced format drive.

Read here:
https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/v ... ed-format/

Granted, with Win7, the patch should have already been included in SP1, but I never tested it myself. And it definitely sounds like you need a newer version of the Intel RST driver.

Also, I am not familiar with your backup software, and whether it recognizes advanced format drives and knows to align the partition to 4K. I know, for instance, that with Acronis, the 2011 release could not, but the 2014 did so just fine.