Thinkpads Forum

You may remember, I had posted some topics with a lot of questions about which x-series ot buy and whatnot. Well I ended up purchasing a refurbished X60s, which arrived today. No matter what I do, I can't get the thing to boot form the HDD however.

Here's what I did.

Took the HDD out of the laptop, attached it to my desktop, and used an "XP Pro SP3" cd I had laying around to install. Everything installed fine, key worked, and XP Pro was up and running on my desktop. I then take the HDD out, put it back in the laptop, and it won't boot. It goes through the splash screen, then just gets stuck at a blinking "_". Confused, I took the HDD out, put it back in the desktop, and it would boot into windows find from there. What is wrong with my thinkpad?

Unsure if it was SP3 that was messing it up, I tried a regular version of XP pro SP2... which wouldn't take my key.

Then I tried my Dell XP Pro SP2 cd which again worked fine on the desktop, but would not start up on the laptop.

Please, help me out. I was sooo excited for this thing to arrive, and now I'm getting quite sad

Feel free to ask any questions, I'm willing to try anything.

Thinkpads are very picky about where the drive is located that has the OS being installed onto it. Generally speaking the target drive must be installed in the Thinkpad at the time the OS is installed. I am not sure of the exact reason for this phenomena, but I suspect the BIOS is looking for something in the MBR on boot that is only created when the target drive is in the Thinkpad while installing the OS. Get/borrow an external DVD drive. Is this a new hard drive or was the entire thing blanked out by the seller?. If you hold down the Thinkvantage button on boot, what happens?

Ugh, this is what I was afraid of. Thought I'd be able to go without getting the dock and simply install the OS through my desktop, since that had worked for other laptops. I'll try a few more things before I track down an external CD drive though.

The HDD was blanked by the seller. 60gb hitachi deskstar

I can use the ThinkTantage button to go into the bios, where I've tried numerous combos but to no avail as of yet. (don't really know what I'm doing)

The reason I asked about the Thinkvantage button is because if a valid recovery partiton existed on the drive, the Thinkvantage button 'might' allow you to reload the OS from the hard drive. If BIOS is the only option, then I doubt a working recovery partition exists, or else there is some other issue with the recovery process. Oh, and make sure the recovery partition (access predesktop areea = normal) is enabled in the security section of BIOS.

I tried that as you said, but I don't believe there is any longer a recovery partition (hangs at the same place). There must be some way to do this without an external drive.

Does it matter if I when I installed the OS on my desktop I had the sata configured as IDE? The thinkpad bios seems to only the option of ahci, so I went back and tried installing on the desktop with the drive configured as that but the Windows setup didn't even recognize my drive :\

It won't be at least a week or so until I could get my hands on an external drive, and I really need this laptop to be up and running asap.

Let me know if you have any more suggestions Harry

You could try something like this....I never did it personally.
http://www.syschat.com/install-windows- ... d-463.html

I don't have that variety of converter :\

I've been messing around with installing from a usb drive, as thinkwiki seems to imply it is possible. I followed this whole setup I found online

http://komku.blogspot.com/2008/11/insta ... -disk.html

Took forever, but looked to be working perfectly. Then at the last step, going to boot into windows, I got a

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware."

error.

I'm about ready to throw this thing out a window

Atreides wrote:I'm about ready to throw this thing out a window

Very sorry to hear that you encountered these difficulties, but you are trying to "reinvent the wheel". You were given all the steps one needs to accomplish your task in the thread that you started a couple of weeks ago.

Follow the instructions in that thread and you will encounter no unpleasant surprises. The problem is not your machine; the problem is that your methodology is not applicable your machine, and you were forewarned of this in the other thread.

Good luck!

EOMtp wrote:Very sorry to hear that you encountered these difficulties, but you are trying to "reinvent the wheel". You were given all the steps one needs to accomplish your task in the thread that you started a couple of weeks ago.

Follow the instructions in that thread and you will encounter no unpleasant surprises. The problem is not your machine; the problem is that your methodology is not applicable your machine, and you were forewarned of this in the other thread.

Good luck!

Thanks EOM :\

I know there are easier ways to go about this (which I plan to go through as soon as possible), but I had a lot of time this weekend and wanted to use my new thinkpad; thus I was willing to try many "unconventional" methods. I'm fairly sure it would have worked, had I not screwed something up myself. I'll relate where I'm at, in case anyone else is curious.

I had XP installed fine off a flash drive, got all the way to the point where it reboots and then actually starts windows (after asking you 3 questions or so). Being the fool I am I unplugged the flash drive while it was rebooting, thinking it was done. Of course I then read online you should not touch the flash drive until you are actually in windows.... Now I have a corrupted install, and go plug the drive into my other computer and use a 3rd party program to wipe the drive. In doing this however, I fear I may have wiped the drives "firmware" as the thinkpad no longer recognizes the drive.
So I go to lenovo's website, find a "hdd firmware utility" and proceed to download the iso. I don't know what lenovo did with the iso, but for some reason I was unable to "get" the files out of it to put on a flash drive. In all 4 image programs I tried the iso showed up as being 38mb in size, but devoid of files. I was able to burn it to a cd and run it from there, but for some reason I could not extract the files out of it to put on a flash drive.

That was pretty much my weekend. I'm going to see now if I can grab an external drive from a friend.

1 question: Since I now know I can't install windows using the drive in another computer, would it be possible to install other programs that way later? I imagine the thinkpad wouldn't be as picky with me taking the drive out to install a few programs, versus taking it out to do a full windows reinstall.

Atreides wrote:1 question: Since I now know I can't install windows using the drive in another computer, would it be possible to install other programs that way later?

The answer is a qualified "Yes". First, note that you can install Windows using another computer, as long as the other computer is a Thinkpad of some kind, any kind (as long as it accepts SATA drives). Second, when you move the X60s drive with Windows to the "other" non-Thinkpad computer to install apps, Windows will "discover" all sorts of "new devices", require drivers, etc. ... + it may be that Windows will not boot at all on the "other" computer once it has been built for the Thinkpad and its hardware configuration. It all depends on the "other" computer's hardware.

One can get an external USB CD drive for just a few dollars. If your reason for porting the X60s drive to another computer is to install apps using a CD drive, then it's far easier to use an external USB CD drive on the X60s. Also note that you can move your hard drive to other Thinkpad which has a CD/DVD drive and install the apps that way.

EOMtp wrote:The answer is a qualified "Yes". First, note that you can install Windows using another computer, as long as the other computer is a Thinkpad of some kind, any kind (as long as it accepts SATA drives). Second, when you move the X60s drive with Windows to the "other" non-Thinkpad computer to install apps, Windows will "discover" all sorts of "new devices", require drivers, etc. ... + it may be that Windows will not boot at all on the "other" computer once it has been built for the Thinkpad and its hardware configuration. It all depends on the "other" computer's hardware.

One can get an external USB CD drive for just a few dollars. If your reason for porting the X60s drive to another computer is to install apps using a CD drive, then it's far easier to use an external USB CD drive on the X60s. Also note that you can move your hard drive to other Thinkpad which has a CD/DVD drive and install the apps that way.

Thanks for the info EOM, I guess thinkpads really are very picky about having their own hdds

I do plan on getting some sort of external drive in the future, I was just thinking in the short term (impatient). My desktop was all custom assembled, so it will be a mystery as to if it will accept the hdd from the thinkpad for extra program-ness.

I did get the laptop working though, posted this message straight from it. Turns out I had for some reason configured sata as AHCI in the bios (do'h). That's why the windows install was looking for drivers that weren't there, and coming up with BSOD's or install errors. A quick switch to compatibility mode amended my issues.

For my first thinkpad, I love it. Best laptop I've ever used.
Really, I've been nothing but impressed with the engineering and design. Barring this hdd pickiness.

I seem to have gotten lucky with the battery on this used unit as well. Whoever owned this must have hardly used it. Battery is original IBM, showing 14 cycles, 100% of original capacity. I'm not sure how to verify this, but I've been using it pretty frequently for almost 6 hours and still have 43% left. All in all, VERY satisfied with my purchase.