Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I have a 600E, Model 2645-4AU that will not boot up when the DVD/CDRW drive is installed. When I put the DVD/CDRW drive in I get one beep, then is goes to the screen that says press F1, then I9990305…missing hard drive. When I put the CDROM, a floppy drive, a second hard drive adapter or even no drive what so ever it boots up normal.

Now what puzzles me is I have another, virtually identical 600E, same model, that boots up fine with the DVD/CDRW drive installed, so I don’t think it is the drive.

The BIOS has been updated. I have removed all memory except the base memory, tried the memory from my other 600E, tried a different hard drive, tried it running with just battery power, tried it without the battery, just running on AC power, changed the CMOS battery, ran all system checks, read the post here, searched other forums for similar problems and even have considered trying an exorcism. I’m stumped!!

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian

I suppose (knowing already that you'll say no !) that the startup order in the BIOS wasn't changed at any time?

Just a possibility

Thanks for the idea Ian, but I checked that and tried changing the start-up order to boot from the hard drive only (along with every other conceivable sequence know to mankind) and still wound up with the same result.

I did notice that when going into the BIOS screen that it would take at least twice as long to get there when I had the DVD/CDRW drive in versus having nothing or one of the other drives in.

I have a pair of 570's that have a similar problem.
One of them randomly gives the error "missing operating system" when docked and the cdrom drive is in the dock. The other one has no problem what so ever.
Recently I needed to interchange the laptops and I switched the hard drives between them and the problem stayed with the hard drive, not the laptop itself.
This leads me to believe the problem is in the hard drive (formatting or drive geometry, LBA etc) not the laptop.
The hard drive giving me problems is running a ghosted image and has had linux installed on it in the past so the MBR could be flakey.

But of course I could be wrong.

Not trying to hijack your thread but this may give you something to think about.

carbon_unit......Hijack away! Any help or ideas is always appreciated and you were not wrong, the drive is the problem. I swapped hard drives and the problem did stay with the drive.

It was/is a used 20GB Hitachi Travelstar that I had picked up some time ago for an upgrade from a 5GB, so I have no idea what was on it previously. When I did the install I ran fdisk, formatted and ran IBM's fitness test before I installed W2K so I never suspected that the drive would be the problem.

Mystery solved and thank you for your help.

Brian

Good!
Now figure out what the problem is and let me know so I can fix mine.
Actuall the one I have with the problem is my 7 year old daughters computer and she only fires it up once a month or so anyway so I am not too motivated to fix it. But the knowledge of the solution would be nice.
Still, Glad I could help.

It's a long shot, but this one worked for me at least a couple of times before. Fdisk the drive with the /mbr switch then reformat.

rick