Thinkpads Forum

hello,

Recently I bought a Hitachi DK239A-48 (4,8 GB) drive on an internet auction. I wanted it to be placed in my 701c notebook (the 540 MB hard disk was simply getting too small). Since the 710c/cs doesn't have any internal drive I instaled the OS on another laptop. The procedure went flawless. After putting it to the 701's caddy and booting it up I got an error saying "IO error. Replace system disk mand press enter to continue". I tried to test it via the thinkpads internal test program - as the progress bar went on the drive started maing a weird high-pitched noise whenever the notebook tried to acces it. As I went into the config utility it stated that the drive capacity is only 566 megs. I did a check on two more laptops - it worked fine. Also both HD Tune and Scan Disk's thorough test report no logical errors or damaged blocks. I also double-checked the jumper settings - everything was OK. Can anybody tell me what could be the problem (The BIOS ?? It can handle more than 655 megs. The drive itself ?? It's a standard ATA drive. Something went wrong during the OS instalation ? Who knows that...).

Thanks for anykind of help,
sb102

Old ThinkPads have a BIOS quirk that changes the apparent drive geometry. The typical fix is to partition and format the drive in the target machine, move it to another machine, make it bootable with DOS, copy the CD to the drive, put it back in the target machine, boot it, start the install.

Second best is to do the install in the second machine, as you did, but still do the partition and format in the 701.

Thanks whizkid,

I did just as you said (partitioned and formated the drive on the 701, copied the CD onto the drive and instaled - boy, did I had a struggle with the boot floppy created with windows XP: it had no FDISK and the format command caused the system to crash, so I had to use the FreeDOS substitutes instead) and it worked like a charm. I guess that I owe you a beer or something for your helpful advice.

sb102

Well my grandparents were from Vilnius (only 300km away!), so if I ever visit the homeland, I might take you up on that.

It has been a while, but If I remember the 701C/CS wont go into hibernate if you don't have a least a small 16BIT FAT partition.