can't access new internal hard drive

[ingber]

I'm trying to set up two old but working Thinkpad a31p PCs for home network backups. I had some intermittent problems rebooting these when I installed Ubuntu 10.10, which seems to be a common grub2 problem, even after I updated them. I then installed 11.04-beta2 on them which seems to be working fine.

My primary boot drives are 100 GB, and I'm trying to mount second 250 GB -- soon to be 1TB drives I'll buy if these work OK -- for the backups from my other PCs on my home network. Lenovo sells 1TB drives for the a31p, and some similar ones are sold on EBay.

I suspect that the 250 GB drives may have have some bad sectors, or at least I want them them checked out and corrected/modified by the Disk Utility. I intend to format these to ext4 (as my 100 GB drives) without any partitions.

My problem is that I can not even get the drives into the PCs. I get an infernal rapid beeping noise whenever I insert these drives. If I try to "trick" the PC's by inserting them just as the screens go black during a restart, the boot does not recognize my primary Ubuntu OS, and keeps trying to go through some Intel set of checks for DHCP, etc. (All my machines and router use only static IPs).

I also put into my fstab files
/dev/sdb1 /media/xdrive auto
where I have created /media/xdrive/, but which did not change the results with this drive in. Of course, without the second drives in, when I boot I have to press "S" to continue, so I've commented out those lines for now.

I also have used an Acronis Recvoery CD to unallocate any used disk space on these two 250 GB drives.

I tried booting off the 11.04 (an 10.10) CDs I prepared to do the initial install with just the second disks present (taking out my primary drives to protect it -- as I did with the Acronis Recovery CD), but I cannot do anything but Install or Try Ubuntu. When I Try, the other drivess are not seen by the Ubuntu CD. It seems I should be able to use the Ubuntu CS as a repair CD, e.g., to format new drives, etc.?

Thanks.

Lester

[ajkula66]

What drives exactly are these 250GB ones?

[ingber]

All these drives worked OK on these PCs under Windows 7 Ultimate x86.

These are Western Digital drives.

Lester

[ajkula66]

The fact that they worked *elsewhere* doesn't necessarily mean much...

I've been using a 250GB WD in my A31p for quite some time now, no issues.

Are you trying them out in Ultrabay carrier? PATA or SATA?

[ingber]

I'm using these drives in the standard ultrabay that comes with the a31p's.

Lester

[ajkula66]

The way I would go about it would be to boot a PC Doctor live CD and wipe the drive from there. If it gives you issues in the Ultrabay, insert it in the main slot and proceed.

Once the drive was wiped you can install whatever you need on it while in the main drive bay.

[sarbin]

I'm using these drives in the standard ultrabay that comes with the a31p's.

Lester

can you point me to the 1TB drives that 'Lenovo sells...for the A31p', please? thx.

[ingber]

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/cont ... 20desktops

for 1TB a31p dirve

[ajkula66]

That's a DESKTOP drive... ...reading comprehension is required...

[ingber]

Lenovo search pulled up this drive when I looked for a31p hard drives.

I see this forum is getting a bit nasty and I do have lot of other work to do. Bye.

[RealBlackStuff]

Those are SATA drives, which you can only use in your A31p inside an Ultrabay second-HD-adapter.
(apart from the fact that the HD referred to is not for a laptop)
Natively the A31p only takes PATA/ATA/IDE (all the same) drives.
The max. PATA drive available is 320GB.

[sarbin]

^^^
the drive linked is also listed as 1" height, so no go in the adapter.

@op...
i've had poor luck with the lenovo parts search function, especially with older thinkpads. don't get discouraged... we are trying to help you out.