T30 with unstable hard drive problems.

[truffy]

Okay now, I don't know where to begin on this problem with my Thinkpad T30. Let's start with when I bought a new WD 250GB HD and had too many crash issues over the past month which I'm not sure the source of these crashes. First I used XP Home CD to install a simple installation procedure I followed using up the whole HD. It crashed within one week. I re-installed XP again, and again it crashed, and then the third time I installed XP it crashed in such a way that I could not boot up the XP CD to re-install it again. So I used the USB as external HD and inserted the old 40GB HD into the laptop to wipe the external HD clean, and then re-inserted the HD and this time I installed XP Home in only a half partition. That went well for a few days until I decided to install XP Pro into the other half partition, now this is where things really went weird.

Somehow this XP Pro was installed but when it came to rebooting it started with the hal.dll error. I tried following all the hal.dll fixing problems available in different sites including replacing the dll file in XP Home Safe Mode, but XP Pro still would not boot after and I get the same error. Then I got into XP Home Safe Mode and looked up the other drive and found out it was actually empty even though all the files are in but there is actually no data, just empty files! I'm not sure what is going on with this, but now this morning I turned on my laptop and Drive: C is gone and what's left of Drive: D is still there but again it is empty! I have heard of problems with T30 before, but this is way beyond my comprehension. Could it be the hard drive was faulty to begin with, or could it be something hidden in my bios?

My bios has a lost password, so I can't play around with it like most users can. Any advice I will be glad to read on, thanks.

Tim

[Harryc]

Sounds like a bad hard drive. Go to the manufacturers website and download and run their diagnostic program.

[truffy]

Wish I had more time for this, but my laptop is presently updating a newly installed XP Home again this time in the old 40 GB HD, not the new 250 GB HD. My dial up speed out in the country will be busy for a little while, and then I'll get back to this forum, thanks.

Tim

[truffy]

Okay now, I have a lot more explaining to do about what happened over the last few days. I never had trouble with the old 40GB HD for some reason ever since I bought this laptop at eBay 2 years ago, but then this new 250GB HD for some reason has crashed 5 times over the last month. What I forgot to say was I was trying to install Windows XP Pro in to the second partition of the HD, this gave all the hal.dll errors. It was then I tried to clone the first partition of Windows XP Home into the second partition that gave me an empty partition with empty files, this is when I discovered I made a mistake in cloning from the first partition, and the mistake was I did not clone the same size, etc... this was my first real attempt at cloning. Now I learned from my mistake and last night I actually successfully cloned my old HD with the newly installed and updated XP Home into the same partition size of 40GB inside the new 250 GB HD, activated it and everything worked. So now I have XP Home in the new HD running again. What I still don't understand is, why I could not install Windows XP Pro into a second partition of this massive 250GB new HD without getting the hal.dll error?

I installed the WD diagnositic tool as you suggested, and it came up with nothing except it passed! So how is it I can't install the second partition with XP Pro without a hal.dll error and I tried everything including replacing that hal.dll file with another one from a good operating computer with XP Pro? And yet no matter how many attempts at trying to fix this error I seem to be blocked from using this XP Pro. I get the feeling the bios is somehow responsible since I bought this with a lost password. Any ideas about what's going on? Thanks.

Tim

[truffy]

Now this is getting really interesting. I tried to install XP Pro into a second partition this morning and this time it rebooted with no hal.dll error and is finishing the installation. The problem is, I don't know how I did it right this time and what I did wrong before? The only difference between this installation and all the others is I partitioned it with 80GB after the first partition with XP Home of 80GB, this seemed to work better than half and half partitions for some reason. Possibly it could be the end part of the 250GB HD is not good even though the test ran fine, or partitioning it half and half for some reason gave some bad partition tables. This is a real mystery! Thanks.

Tim