Thinkpads Forum

Should T60 BIOS detect a SATA controller in the Expresscard slot?

On desktops, I'm used to seeing BIOS displays from added PCI/PCI-x PATA/SATA controller cards flaunting their stuff during the boot sequence. Typically (on desktops with Award BIOS) one sees them twice: once when the BIOS lists them and later when the cards themselves list the attached devices.

I have a JMicron 20360/20363 AHCI SATA II e-card installed...the hardware is detected by WinXP (which asks for the driver and selects a RAID driver from the installation CD) and by lspci in Linux. However, in neither OS is the attached drive actually visible.

The drive installed in the external SATA/USB enclosure is the one that was shipped with the T60: an 80GB Hitachi. When connected via USB it shows up fine in both XP and Linux and also appears as a boot option if one presses F1 from the blue-button intervention UI. The enclosure has independent power.

Clues? comments? tips? anyone? Could it be that the T60's BIOS doesn't actually support all of its hardware?

thks
Helen

I'm not quite sure I follow what you are asking, however, I have used both Cardbus and Express SATA cards with a T60 and they supported the attached drives without any issues under Windows XP and Vista Ultimate x86.

The T60 is now in East Timor with my daughter so I can't check anything specific with it, and I don't recall what messages were displayed during startup.

Anyway, what drive enclosure have you put the Hitachi 80GB drive in? Have you been able to check that the SATA (or eSATA?) cable you are using between the Express card and the enclosure is working in another SATA environment?

Cheers,

Bill B.

bill bolton wrote:I'm not quite sure I follow what you are asking, however,

I'm really trying to establish whether it's worth persevering with my efforts to get this card working....

bill bolton wrote:I have used both Cardbus and Express SATA cards with a T60 and they supported the attached drives without any issues under Windows XP and Vista Ultimate x86.

....and that encourages me to keep trying

bill bolton wrote:Anyway, what drive enclosure have you put the Hitachi 80GB drive in? Have you been able to check that the SATA (or eSATA?) cable you are using between the Express card and the enclosure is working in another SATA environment?

Now that was a question worth asking. I've assumed that the enclosure must work because (a) it's identical to another one I have hanging off a PCI SATA II controller board on one of my server machines (dual boot Win2K/Mandriva 10.1) and it works perfectly on that machine; and (b) it's working fine with its USB option.

I know the cable's OK because I fetched it off another machine that optionally attaches SATA drives on an occasional basis. But when I attached *this* enclosure to that machine, it wasn't seen. (Both of the machines I'm talking about here have Award BIOS so you can see during the boot process whether the attached drives are visible).

So - I ripped the HDD out of the enclosure and connected it "nude". Then the same machine (an ancient MSI board with an even more ancient AMD Sempron CPU) saw it.

However, when I move that rig over to the T60, I'm in the same boat again. Still, it's progress that I've established that the SATA outlet on that enclosure is probably faulty.

Is there any way (in XP) to avoid the Thinkpad splash screen during bootup and see the output from the BIOS throughout post and startup?

Thanks, Bill (or anyone else).
Helen

meself wrote:Is there any way (in XP) to avoid the Thinkpad splash screen during bootup and see the output from the BIOS throughout post and startup?

Got it - just had to change the boot mode from Quick to Diagnostic. No sign of recognition of the ecard, though, which is disheartening at midnight.

H.

Well, this morning I have the disk visible and contented, connected perfectly as drive Z on WinXP (as set up for it when it was connected via USB) and as sdb on Linux using the standard libata ahci modules.

The only thing I did differently was plugging the eSata cable into the Expresscard *before* inserting the card into e/34 slot. I immediately saw the drive in both WinXP and Linux, just as I have seen it previously using the USB connection.

So - it's been a hardware issue all along. The card *is* a bit wobbly laterally, which I've not encountered with a cardbus card before; and you don't get that distinctive "click and pop" that you do when seating a regular PCMCIA card. I haven't had an Expresscard slot before, only PCMCIA II on my TP 390e.

This card is the "short" or "hidden" type, with the single port flush with the side of the case. I chose it to save space but it might not have been the better choice if I'd had foreknowledge of the sloppy "fit". That said, I have no way to tell whether it is the socket that is too loose or the plug on the card a bit too thin. Either way, I guess I need to work on technique!

Thanks to Bill Bolton for your assistance.
H.