Thinkpads Forum

I have a thinkpad 600 with the very latest bios (ibet54ww- date
9/18/1999). I recently purchased a thinkpad 600 hard drive from
cdw. It is a 20gb SimpleTech hard drive.

My bios will not recognize this drive. I have tried everything and
still the bios will not show it detected the new hard drive in the
bios.

I can't put in my old 6gb hard drive to test since it is broken.

I have tried the following:

Reseating
Initializing
Testing the drive on desktop - it's good
Tried another drive
Formatted as NTFS
Formatted as FAT32
Created smaller partitioned
Reinstalled the bios upgrade

Nothing has worked. Do you think the connectors may be damaged? Can I try a previous Bios?

Help

Make sure 2 or more pins are not shorted with a small plastic piece. It may have come from the company set up as a "slave" drive rather than a master. If you put it in your desktop as a slave it would work in this case. Other than that, I've had similar problems with a Seagate drive that worked in another thinkpad. Sometimes, the pins are too thin or something in some of these drives that they don't make appropriate contact. If all else fails, send it back for a replacement. personally I only really trust IBM or Hitachi (makers of IBM drives) in my Thinkpads. They are both labeled 'travelstar." These seem most compatible and you can use the Hitachi/IBM diagnostic program on them.

The drive is set to master with no jumpers or extenders attached. I did try another drive - travelstar - and it also did not work. I think the ide connectors on the motherboard have been stretched out our something. Do you think I could try soldering some metal on the hard drive pins to make them a little thicker so they would connect?

I really don't want to have to pay $150 for a new motherboard if it is just that one piece of the motherboard.

I wouldn't do any soldering in that area at all if I were you. If all else fails look for the bottom half of a 600E or a 600X on eBay. Sometimes they sell them for very resonable $. I've seen them for under $50 on occassion.

You know, I've had similar problems with T22 and T30 models. I found that all was solved when I powered down the machine all the way and took the battery out before putting the battery back in and powering up. Don't know if it will help but worth a try. Seems that having the battery in and some kind of "juice" to the machine causes these TP's CMOS to remember the last attempt at turning the machine on. Good luck.