Thinkpads Forum

I just bought a new 100 Gb serial ATA hard drive to run in the Ultrabay Slim Adapter in my T60p, but I can't seem to get the system to recognize it.

I have enabled it in the boot priority list in the BIOS settings so the system should see it, and the 2nd hard drive checks out fine in the BIOS diagnostics. Unfortunately, it doesn't show up with a new drive letter in My Computer, and I can't figure out how to get it either recognized or formatted.

If anyone can help me get over this hurdle, I would greatly appreciate it. TIA.

Start windows, right click "My Computer", select "Manage", select "Disk Management". You should be able to find the 100gb drive there. Right click it and create a partition, then format it. Now you can use your new drive.

Thanks. I was left-clicking on My Computer and just seeing the first HDD, since the second one wasn't yet initialized. The right-click step and follow-up steps were what I was missing.

Since I travel Mon-Fri, I want to have a daily back-up available during the week, but was running out of available room on my first HDD (less than 19 Gb free space).

Now that the 2nd HDD is recognized and formatted, I want to set it up as my primary back-up location for R&R to run nightly, and then my external USB HDD at home can be set up as my secondary back-up location for R&R to run weekly.

FWIW, the new serial ATA drive in the Utrabay Slim adapter appears to be hot-swappable!!! This is in direct contradiction to what I read in Lenovo's online literature and in various posts on this forum. It hot swaps just like my USB flash drives. That is a nice surprise.

further FWIW, the first undocumented hot swappable HDD was, for me, in my 770Z running W2k..

and every top model thinkpad i have had since that time would support a hot swap into the UB..

Are there larger hard drives available for this ultrabay? I have seen threads on this forum referencing a Toshiba 200GB drive. Where can I find out which drives will work in the ultrabay so that I can possibly find larger ones? Thanks.

Welcome to the forum.

Any 9mm height 2.5" hdd will fit in the ultrabay adapters, I believe the largest capacity hdds have 250GB at the moment. The only condition is S-ATA adapters need S-ATA hdds and P-ATA adapters need P-ATA hdds.

Thanks for the quick reply and the welcome. There is a wealth of information on this site and I hope to be able to contribute back once my freshly ordered T61p arrives in a few weeks. It appears that the forum members have high praise for the Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm 200gb drive so I think I'll grab one. That will give me 400gb of total internal storage (less the restore partition and the industry-wide misleading capacity definition which always annoys me). I also read here that the ultrabay is hot-swappable. That's very cool. I expect to have the HD in that bay most of the time (for Itunes and other media storage, plus some games) and have a DVD burner at the ready for the occasional times I need one. My current Macbook Pro has been fun to toy around with but it's days are now numbered...

BTW the P-ATA ultrabay adaptor for the T4x series, with a P-ATA drive, works in my T60p.

I tried hot swapping my dvd burner in my A22p. It FRIED it. Now I am scared [censored] to swap an ultrabay drive without powering down first.

T23_Owner wrote:I tried hot swapping my dvd burner in my A22p. It FRIED it.

I've never had an A series so can't comment on what their bay technology is like, but I frequently hot swap Ultrabay Slim devices on T series ThinkPads and have never had any problems.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Roadster wrote:FWIW, the new serial ATA drive in the Utrabay Slim adapter appears to be hot-swappable!!! This is in direct contradiction to what I read in Lenovo's online literature and in various posts on this forum. It hot swaps just like my USB flash drives. That is a nice surprise.

My T60 will -sort of- hot swap. Or, maybe it could be called "you think you hot swapped, but just try and find it in Explorer"

What works best for me is to power down and slide in the drive. Since I do not use a CD very often, I just leave the 2nd drive in there. Nice to have it!

I also notice that the Ultra Bay slim from my T43p -will- work in my R52 which is the old style Ultra Bay. There's about a 2mm gap, but heck it works...

Interesting article on hotswapping:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_ho ... ay_devices

AvalonXIII wrote:Interesting article on hotswapping:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_ho ... ay_devices

Unfortunately, I couldn't understand a word of that, and I have a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering!

Can you please translate that into a 30-second summary that a layman can understand? TIA.

Roadster wrote:Unfortunately, I couldn't understand a word of that...

That is all Linux OS stuff. Doesn't apply to Windows unless perhaps you are a programmer and can use that info as a starting point in writing a Windows program.