Thinkpads Forum

Folks,

I purchased a new Seagate Momentus 500gb 5400rpm drive for my T61p to use in the ultrabay. This replaces an existing Western Digital 350gb drive. When I put the drive in the smartbay initially, the computer does not see it. I look in Vista's storage management and see the drive unitialized. I try to initialize and format and it does not work. I also bought an Apricorn USB drive upgrade kit and I am able to use apricorn to initialize, format and copy files to the drive. When I put that drive back in the ultrabay, I still don't see it. I am not sure if this is related to any limits on the ultrabay regarding a drive so large or something else. At this point, I can only imagine the drive has problems. Any tips or leads would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Warren

Do you use a genuine Lenovo/IBM ultrabay HD adapter? I vaguely remember other threads mentioning problems with HDs in (non-Lenovo) ultrabay adapters (maybe a search will find them).
I have a Samsung 500GB drive and a WD 500GB drive and both work(ed) flawlessly in a genuine Lenovo ultrabay adapter in my T61p.

Boot into the BIOS and try the built-in diagnostics on the second HD. If that doesn't work, thy pulling your main drive and puttin the new one there. Then run the dagnostics on that. If the drive works as the main drive but not in the ultrabay, I am guessing the problem is in the PATA->SATA bridge circuit that is part of the ultrabay adapter.

As an update, I have heard other reports of drives not being recognized in ultrabays, and they were all large Seagate drives. (300 GB or larger) They may have all been 7200 RPM. I had a few Seagate drives here and tried them in Ultrabay adapters on T61p (vista) and T60 (XP). They were smaller drives (60, 120, 160), and the only 7200 RPM drive was the 60GB one. They all worked.