Thinkpads Forum

Generally if there's sounds coming out of a disk drive which lead you to believe something is not normal, then yes, the drive either has problems or will shortly have problems. If it is a recent Hitachi drive, you can download the Drive Fitness Test and verify its operation. Other disk drive manufacturers sometime have diagnostics which are designed to test out their drives. I don't believe that you can run PC Doctor on the 600E; I remember trying to boot a 600X version and it did a hardware check which said I was using the wrong system.

I just ran the HDD-1 diagnostic on my 600E and it too was making some very strange noises. Ones that I normally associate with a "funnel" test where the heads access an inner track and then goes out to an outer track. It's possible you are hearing the same things and therefore your drive is okay (I'm assuming that my drive is okay too!).

You have something very strange going on. I've worked on computers for over 20 years, and Murphy's law often comes into play. But yours sound like it should be an easy fix..

When it isn't booting smacks of bad RAM, or RAM slot. With desktops 99% of the time if the machine doesn't boot and it's not a software related problem the problem is either the RAM or video card.. With laptops it's usually the RAM or FRU...Yet yours seem to be checking out OK..

And when it's booting to the floppy screen that points to the HDD, or OS on the HDD.. The last thing is the motherboard, but you say that checks out OK too..

As others said try to get a hold of a bootable CD, or maybe a floppy drive and try to boot from a floppy...

I'm running out of ideas....

Had a long phone conversation with mayo367 and the consensus is that the HD may be bad. He was able to get a Windows CD to boot but it said that there might be something wrong with the disk drive. I passed along a link to the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test program with the suggestion that it be run and if it passes, to then erase the entire drive and try re-running the Windows install.

The 600E's built in disk diagnostic did indicate a pass, but I'd rather see what the DFT program says.

I was coached by rkawakami, we went to the start up menu & clicked each drive icon in order, FDD, CDROM, & HDD-1, & did manage to finally get the thinkpad to acknowledge to either boot from the HD or bootable disk. When i selected disk & began to install the Win OS, eventually during the process i received this message: Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged.

I'm running a Drive Fitness Test, i selected option 2 (ATA only),
i noticed that it does scan my system looking for hard drives and optical drives, but it does not present a list of devices that it has found and ask me if it's correct. It immediately jumps to the agree or disagree screen, the next screen begins to Detect Devices & detecting IDE primary master........ & it just stops there & stays on that screen.

If it seems stuck or does not find your hard drive then I can only assume that there's some problem with the drive or the IDE interface on the motherboard. If you have your Ultrabay optical drive installed DFT should be able to "see" that drive as well (would be identified as the secondary master).

My only suggestion at this point would be to install another hard drive if you have one OR if you have the Ultrabay optical drive installed, pull that out and see if your original HD is then detected.

After a considerable time i see the following: A:\DFT > Unhandled exception 000D at 00B7 224E ErrCode 7520.

It appears the the HD is at fault.

I purchased a new HD & i managed to install Win 2000 Pro but the problem remains.