A20M Hard Drive Upgrade

Message

mwdake · #1 Post by **mwdake** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 9:47 pm

I have an A20M 2628-41U that orginally came with a 12gb drive. I just bought me a new Toshiba 40gb Drive. When I put it in my Laptop it tells me no Hard Drive found. I figured maybe I needed to update the bios so I flashed the bios to the latest version and I still get no Hard Drive found. I know the drive is OK because I just put it in my desktop using a ext. USB case and it sees it fine. Does anybody have any ideas on where I went wrong?

thanks in advance.

Martin

Deb Suran · #2 Post by **Deb Suran** » Tue Apr 26, 2005 8:25 am

It's probably not properly seated - try turning the ThinkPad on its side, HDD port up, and slide it in carefully until it seats firmly.

mwdake · #3 Post by **mwdake** » Tue Apr 26, 2005 10:09 am

I must have tried this 15 times, I don't know why it won't seat properly, I have the screws and holder in place and I can feel it latch in place. Every time I put the old drive back it seats properly and I even tried another old drive and it seats OK. I know the new drive is good because I can see it fine when I put it in my desktop. I am about ready to give up, I just don't see how I can mess up sliding the drive into the slot.

#4 Post by **underclocker** » Tue Apr 26, 2005 3:39 pm

Here is a long shot possibility, but I've seen similar issues and this has helped. Is the new disk "initialized"? I don't even know exactly what this means, but I do know that new disks sometimes need to be initialized (not partitioned or formatted) before a system can "see" them.

To do this, attach drive to Win XP machine, go to Admin. Tools, Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management, and right click the new drive and then click Initialize.

Sorry if you've already done this, but as I said, it's a long shot.

Good luck.

mwdake · #5 Post by **mwdake** » Tue Apr 26, 2005 4:29 pm

Thanks for the reply and great answer; however, I already did that. I put it in my desktop and even went through and formatted it.

mwdake · #6 Post by **mwdake** » Tue Apr 26, 2005 6:00 pm

Thanks to those who replied,
I appreciate your ideas. I read somewhere that this model is tricky to seat the hard drive in, I don't know why as it looks like it can't go anywhere else. Anyhow, I removed ther drive from the little holder that holds it in and put it in on its own and it was found OK. I stood the the 2 drives up on end against each other and the new Toshiba drive is about 1/8 inch shorter that the old drive. When I put it back in the holder and inserted it it was not recognized again. So I mounted it without the holder, but, you cannot get the holder on once it is in place and it is tricky to get out should you need to. I snipped of the ends of the 2 holes in the plastic holder and refitted it. I am re-imaging it now.
So if you buy a Toshiba drive beware, I don't know if the slight difference in length is what gave me the headache but, it seemed to.