Thinkpads Forum

Howdy folks. Bought a couple of thinkpads from a local dealer. both were in poor condition but the price was right.

Problem - neither of them recognize the HDD In the bios, where it should say the disk name it just says ! primary hard drive with a " ! " beside it. Disks work fine in other laptops and with adapters and recognize and boot into the OS.

Any solutions for this problem ? I assume it is a bios fix since both of them have the same symptom no matter what disk I plug in from 1gb - 20gb.. First thing that came to mind was a bad disk controller but the CD works just fine and boots right to win2000 until the point it says you have no disks to install the OS.

Any tips to recognize the disk is appreciated, systems seem to work fine otherwise. Could it be that there is a dead disk controller but cd still works ? already flashed the bios with no changes.

Simon

390X
PIII 450 / 128MB
CD / FLOPPY
! no hard drive

Maybe this? http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... light=pins

Since you appear to have several drives, you could "sacrifice" one and see if this works. I know with my ancient 360, a slighly less ancient 810MB drive would not work, until I dealt with the pins as described in that post. Actually, I snipped them off completely and it works perfectly.

doubt it because this style of caddy doesn't have anything to it that touches the master/slave pins, it looks like it would be covered by plastics from the systemboard and u have the set the jumpers yourself. which I already tried on M / S / CS with or without the CD installed. is this my problem ? am I using the wrong caddy ?

The drive controller is likely dead, this does happen. When you receive pallet loads of recycled laptops as we do, you do have notebooks (any manufacturer) where it will boot off the optical, but just won't recognize the hdd. I assume you've checked out for any physical mechanical problems that all hdd pins do contact the connector, in which case write off the notebook as a dud with a dead controller - which is prolly *why* they were sold off by the seller initially.

that was my first thought , but is it possible the drive controller could be dead on all of them and the CD works fine. don't they use the same controller. I will check for physical damage tonight when I open one up.

If they do use the same controller all I can think of might be a bad trace leading to the HDD. But I still think there is a fix for this and I am doing something wrong.


It doesn't sound like drives power up.

Then let me know if you want to buy more laptops with dead hdd controllers. We have plenty. Will give you discount on 10+.

This is a response to show you that *yes*, it is 100% definite and positively possible that *all* the notebooks you bought will never boot off a hdd. There's enough ppl getting screwed left and right on E-auctions (no trademarks mentioned), we actually have a problem when it comes to intentionally selling non-working items.