Thinkpads Forum

Hi, I have a 560e which suffered chronic damage to it's original 2.1GB HDD several years ago. It was able to run for a while but was severly crippled, this HDD has since been lost to the void of time and a new one is here to take its place.

So, I have a 6.00GB IBM Travelstar which functions perfectly in my Compaq Armada (had to check it was still good) but my thinkpad does not recognise it, even after a BIOS update. It's not found under the "test" section if I boot it up holding F1, and none of my boot-floppies can see it either. My only thought was that possibly a linux boot floppy could see it since linux ignores the HDD paramaters set by the bios as stated here.

If anybody has any suggestions, I'll give it a go. Thanks!

That drive should work well in the 560E.

There are some other things that could be going on...

- Make sure your BIOS is the latest available.
- Make sure the connection is good
- Update the drive firmware if possible

Well, it's a DARA-206000 so it's not supported by the tool here for the 560e, but it is supported by the newer one here which is an ISO CD image and doesn't specifically support the 560e. Either way, I can't boot my 560e from a CDROM, so will this tool work just fine if I put the HDD in my Armada so I can boot the CD?[/url]

Go to Western Digital's site and download EZ-Drive (it's free). My suspicion is that your BIOS is having problem with the drive size. This tool takes care of it (if that is, in fact, the problem).

Well, I'm getting somewhere now...

EZ-Drive sees the disk and can work its magic with it, but the thinkpad still seems to be blind to the world. The new WD tool (Data Lifeguard) refuses to work with the disk because it's not a WD drive.

The only difference I see now is the addition of the IBM and Thinkpad logos to the boot splash screen.

Perhaps Hitachi/IBM has such a tool, too. I'm not at all positive about this, but I vaguely remember using EZ-drive on a non-Western Digital drive...??

Are you sure your hard drive controller is OK... ??

Well, since EZ-Drive can see and work with the disk I must assume;
A) It's compatible
B) The controller is functional.

It seems to be that the EZBios thing doesn't work. I'm going to put the HDD in my Armada and give the IBM disk a try.

Update:

The disk boots into EZ-BIOS in the Armada, and the IBM firmware update disk says the drive is running the latest firmware.

I plugged the Armada's HDD (a DBCA-206480 6.49GB Travel Star) into the ThinkPad, and what do you know, it can't see it! I'm wondering if it's something more serious and shall check for any physical damage to the MB.

Update 2: I can't find any sign of damage, and the boot time has greatly decreased from holding F1 and hitting the power and the Easy Setup screen appearing.


Final Update (hopefully):

This is absurd! After a bit of playing with jumpers, the Thinkpad boots the Armada's disk and the Armada boots the Thinkpad disk. However, no manner of combinations can get the Thinkpad to boot its disk. So, I've swapped them and am about to attempt OS installs.