Thinkpad R30 wont turn on with HDD plugged in

[poita]

Hi all,
As the title suggests, I have a Thinkpad R30 which simply will not respond to pressing the power button (it won't power on) when the 2.5" HDD is plugged into the computer. (I am not talking about an external drive, i mean the drive which is in the original drive bay).
When i remove the drive from the notebook it starts up fine (booting into the ubuntu 7.10 startup menu) but as soon as i plug that drive in it just doesn't respond a press of the power button. This just suddenly happened one day, there were no symptoms prior to this occurring.

I bought a 2.5 -> 3.5 IDE gender adaptor to test the laptop drive on my desktop computer and it works fine. Running scandisk in windows shows up no errors (no s.m.a.r.t errors either from memory... not 100% sure on the s.m.a.r.t, been a while since i tested it). I installed gutsy gibbon (ubuntu 7.10) on the notebook drive while it was installed in the desktop and it ran flawlessly (in the desktop).

I dont have access to any other notebook drives at the moment, so i cant swap it out for another drive unfortunately... and i would prefer not to have to buy another notebook drive if possible (another drive would cost almost as much as the r30!

There is no apparent damage to either the HDD or inside the HDD bay either, barring an electrical fault in the notebook (which only triggers when the HDD is plugged in, power brick issue??), this one really has me stumped. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance.
Peter.

[Harryc]

I'm guessing there is a problem with the internal IDE connection or a problem with the IDE controller. Personally I'd find or borrow a hard drive to test. If that second drive fails, you're looking at a system board replacement. Another alternative is to boot off of an external USB drive or possibly a CF card. You could even use your existing drive and boot off of it using an enclosure or one of those IDE to USB cables.