T61 wont see the harddrive

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skpamnani · #1 Post by **skpamnani** » Fri Apr 29, 2011 6:17 pm

Hello,
first poster here, so my first lenovo (bought used) ran good for about 3 months but yesterday it suddenly said harddrive failed, windows shutting down. now when I boot it, I get to the IBM thinkpad screen, then a white dash blinks on a black screen n then a full black screen, nothing else but the system keeps running till the power is taken away. Now i did the hardisk test from BIOS and it passed for everything. I ran the windows 7 cd to reinstall the windows(thought it would fix it) but it wont see any hard drive where it could install windows.

BTW i m posting from the same laptop by running a linuxmint live cd. even this doesn't show any harddrive in my computer.
PLease help!
Also pressing the blue thinkvantage button just starts the BIOS page
Laptop is lenovo t61-6460-07eu
Please tell what should I do? I bought it with a dock and stuff and was so excited but now I m lost

Thanks

Oh yeah, so i thought the hard drive had failed so I removed it to see if it makes a difference and it does. It says missing BCD.exe or something if there is no hard drive in the system.

hunterman223 · #2 Post by **hunterman223** » Fri Apr 29, 2011 6:31 pm

If there is no hard drive in at all then it will not tell you anything about any kind of exe, because effectively there is no OS. So the bios is detecting the HDD? try resetting the bios to defaults, I can't remember but its F something, it says at the bottom of the bios screen. If that doesn't work take out the battery, press and hold the power button for 1 second 9 times and on the 10th time hold for 30 seconds. (hard reset) if none of that works and Linux still doesn't pick it up then you'll need a new HDD.

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#3 Post by **Harryc** » Fri Apr 29, 2011 6:41 pm

Check the model # of the hard drive while you have it out of the machine. Go to the manufacturers website and download and run their diagnostic.

skpamnani · #4 Post by **skpamnani** » Fri Apr 29, 2011 7:49 pm

Hi thanks for the reply, I did that hard reset but it didn't help

I guess I'll change the hard drive

hunterman223 · #5 Post by **hunterman223** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 5:14 am

skpamnani wrote:Hi thanks for the reply, I did that hard reset but it didn't help I guess I'll change the hard drive

Probably the best route. Did you try harryc's suggestion? If you have another machine available that has the same SATA connectors I would try testing it that way too.

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