Thinkpads Forum

I have a T60P. I've just got hold of a new 500GB (7K) drive from seagate.

The new drive is in the expansion slot in the laptop (replacing the DVD).
When the laptop is in the small doc and I power on, press F12 to bring up boot options I always get an error saying that the 500GB drive failed to initialize.

If I boot up from the main drive, the 500GB drive is seen just fine by the OS.
If I place the 500GB in the main drive bay, it boots just fine.

I just can not boot off it when its in the doc and in the expansion slot.

I also note that when the laptop is not in the doc, pressing f12 take quite a while for it to display the list of drives.

I have two of the new 500GB drives and both have the same issue when the laptop is in the doc.

Any ideas please ?

You probably have to initialize the drive first. Try this and post back how it goes.

Good luck

Marin

Nice, idea - I've already done that, formated and installed OS while the new drive was in the MAIN drive bay on the laptop. I only have problems with the drive in the ultrabay. Other drives in the ultrabay are fine. So it seems to be some sort of drive issue.

I've got a similar problem. I received the drive last week (the same 7200.4 Momentus as you) and I've been trying for a couple of days to clone my old disk onto it. I've tried both Acronis True Image 11 and the latest Diskwizard from Seagate (which is really just their private-labele version of True Image). The cloning seems to work just fine (it takes several hours and it says it's successful at the end), but when I try to boot to the new drive the machine just freezes. I've tried going into the Windows Recovery Console (my disk has XP SP 3, and even though although I only have a SP 2 boot disk it seems to work ok) and when I run FIXMBR it tells me there's something wrong with my MBR and asks if I want to repair it. I say yes and then reboot, but I get the same behavior (the machine just dies when it tries to boot off the new disk). I just posted something on the Seagate forums about this... hopefully that will get me some help.

Strange ... today I have been able to boot off my drive and bring up the boot list (F12) without any problems ... I need to do a little more playing and see what happens.

Where did you find your 7200.4 in stock? I can find them anywhere... most vendors are saying out of stock until the last week of the month.

provantage briefly had stock of about 140 units, sold out now until 1st week of march.

I figured it out... I had to do the mirror operation with the new/destination drive installed in the Thinkpad (and the old/souce one installed in the external USB-to-SATA housing). When I was researching the problem I came across a post someplace the said this had to do with the low-level configuration (sectors/tracks/etc) being different in the Thinkpad than in most USB-to-SATA adapters, but I never found a good explanation of this. In any case, the new drive is working fine now.