A31 and WD800BEVE 80G Western Digital Scorpio

[Axemonkey]

I recently purchased a WD800BEVE 80G Western Digital Scorpio drive to replace my failing 40G Samsung in my A31. I hooked the drive up to my desktop PC via usb enclosure and partitioned, formatted, and copied all the things I wanted on to the drive. Problem: my A31 won't see the drive when I insert it. Now.. this new WD Scorpio is an EIDE and my old 40g is ATA.. I DID ask at the store for an ATA drive I didn't realize until after I got home it was EIDE... is this the problem? When I turn the laptop on with it in, it won't even boot from the CD drive it just gives me a boot agent error. Can somebody please tell me what the issue is.. I don't know how much longer my old drive is going to last! Thanks so much!

Rob

[RealBlackStuff]

EIDE/IDE/ATA/PATA are all the same, so your HD is OK.
But copying files over is not going to work on the new HD.
You need to either make a 'clone' of the old HD or rather (and much better) use an imaging program such as Acronis True Image.

[schen]

If the load on your old HDD is old and gunked up or if your old drive is two unstable, then another option would be to use a set of restore disks to set everything back to it's original factory state. At that point, then you can pretty much start over; do all the updates (both IBM and MS), copy over your old files, then you good to go.

You can check around for restore disks and someone will generally help you out.

[Axemonkey]

EIDE/IDE/ATA/PATA are all the same, so your HD is OK.
But copying files over is not going to work on the new HD.
You need to either make a 'clone' of the old HD or rather (and much better) use an imaging program such as Acronis True Image.

This ended up being a really silly error on my behalf. The reason the drive was not working was this:

There is a little metal sleeve that attaches to the HD before you slide it back into the Thinkpad. I didn't realize it was part of the computer, and not part of the old drive right away. When that sleeve is not on the HD, the computer can NOT see the HD, and goes straight to trying to boot from network connections. Once I took the sleeve off the old HD and attached it to the new one, and reinsterted the drive.. everything was smooth as silk. I have since reinstalled Windoze XP and restored everything just to the way I had it.. minus one unhappy hard drive! Good as new.. thanks all for your help!

[proaudioguy]

Your pins probably didn't line up without the caddy installed. I had to run without a caddy in one machine for a while. It was very difficult to get the HD pins lined up. Half the pins were out and the other half were in the wrong holes.