Hard drive not found

[sethpop]

I have a T22 and when I turn it on I get a red screen with white lettering
saying:

Hard drive not found. If operating system is not found, re-install the hard
drive.

Then you hit a key or it times out and goes to a black screen with "No
operating system". This is not what happened the first time I started it up
and was able to install Debian on it. It doesn't seem to be the hard drive,
because I have tried with two different hard drives. Please read the full
story (below) for all the details. Can anyone give me a hint on what I can
try next?

Thanks,
Seth

The full story:

I bought a T22, and it was delivered with nothing... no OS etc. (It was
used, and sold to me this way.)

I downloaded and installed debian 3.1, this turned into some trouble because
there was something wrong with the hard drive. After about 60% partitioning
it got stuck with some bad sectors, and failed to install. Finally I gave
up on having a 20 GB hard drive and just partitioned the first half, which I
knew was good from an extensive session of PC Doctor downloaded from IBM.

I got debian up and going, things seemed good. When it started up I had to
hit F12 and select the hard drive, so something wasn't quite right, but I
thought I could deal. I turned off the machine, and the next day when I
turned it on I got a red screen with white lettering saying:

Hard drive not found. If operating system is not found, re-install the hard
drive.

I figured the HD had crashed, so I complained to the seller of the laptop,
and they gladly shipped me a replacement hard drive. After I popped this
one in, (also used, but from another T22) I expected smooth sailing, and now
I still get the same problem.

If I am quick at start up I can enter into the BIOS and see that the hard
drive is there (It shows the hard drive in the list of boot devices and
displays the serial number). I have tried to reseat the hard drive into
it's slot, but now I don't know what to do. Any help would be greatly
appreciated. What can I try next?

[dlichterman]

Try dban

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

this will sometimes fix weird issues like this. If not, looks like maybe a bad HD

[JBUK]

If you are having no luck with TWO hdds then perhaps the T22 is now faulty.

I would boot from a floppy or CD and use fdisk to create a partition and then format it. If this works you can make a fresh start.

Alternatively get the IBM DFT program, its a disk fitness tool that you use to check a disk out and enable it on your PC.

If you have partition magic this could be used as well. Any error codes you get will help diagnose the problem area.

Nil desperandum.

[sethpop]

It turned out the second hard drive was good, and the first was bad. The final solution which allowed me to do a proper partition and install of Debian was just resetting the bios to defaults. This fixed it. I think it was stuck in a weird state with all the tinkering I was doing.

Deffinitely the Drive Fitness Test, and Disk Doctor from the thinkpad site were helpful in reassuring me that the second drive was still good.

That's all! Thanks for the feedback!
Seth