System won't recognize HDD in drive slot

[Oro]

I can't get the system (booting or in Win XPP) to recognize the internal drive on a T43.

I tried to clone this drive via Macrium Reflect just before that happened. Here's what I did:

1) system normal, started Reflect and tried to clone C: drive to D: - an 80GB IDE drive mounted in a caddy in the ultrabay.
2) After about 8 minutes (that seemed too fast?), Reflect said "done." Powered down, put clone into main bay to test, had boot failure ("media failure" "no operating system found" "exiting Broadcom...")
3) Installed regular c: drive, same result. Twice.
4) Panic
5) Put C: drive in caddy, inserted. I get "media failure" message but then it moves to boot.

I tried looking at the BIOS boot menu, and HDDO is listed there (I think this is the main internal drive bay?), but nothing inserted there is recognized. I powered down fully between all swaps, etc. and tried to be ultra careful.

When I hit "explore" in Windows, My former "d:" drive (ultrabay) is now listed as c: and anything in a USB port becomes "d:" unlike d: and e: before - like the main bay is just gone. If I put a disk in it, I can here it power and spin up, but it cannot be seen at all and does not trigger a "new hardware" notice.

I have searched/googled for any clues and checked the Macrium forum but no luck. Any ideas?

[RealBlackStuff]

If you want to clone a drive, you have to put the source in the USB case or 2dd HDD ultrabay, and the target in the original HDD bay.
Otherwise the laptop won't recognize the drive. Funny IBM/Lenovo (il)logic...

[Oro]

If you want to clone a drive, you have to put the source in the USB case or 2dd HDD ultrabay, and the target in the original HDD bay.
Otherwise the laptop won't recognize the drive. Funny IBM/Lenovo (il)logic...

Ok, will do. That's weird. When I re-attempt it, I'll try that. First I have to try to figure out why the system won't recognize the HDD bay at all. I tried looking for it with diskmgmt.msc and a drive inserted, too, but no luck.

From reading, it seems normally this would be a sign of a bad HDD. But I can put either HDD in the caddy and the bios and windows sees them.

[RealBlackStuff]

T4x machines are notorious for poorly soldered Southbridge chips (big Intel one under the wifi card).
Remove the palmrest and wifi card, then put some pressure on various corners of that chip while trying to boot.
If you are now successful, resp. the HD is found, you need to have the SB chip reballed.

[Oro]

I've tried the following, no joy with any:

1) Pressure on Southbridge card (several attempts/various locations)
2) Updated BIOS to latest.
3) Updated embedded controller to latest (FYI the Lenovo file is bad. Does not work via software installer - hangs. I found an old thread that suggested running it unattended - " -s -a -s" and it worked).

I'm baffled. Whatever drive I put in the ultrabay BIOS sees and boots from - but sees none in internal/main, though it will power them (can hear them spin up). So it's not an individual HDD problem from what I can tell.

So does this still leave the Southbridge chip as the likely culprit still? I find it crazy suspicious/unlikely it would show the first problem and fail on the first boot that is with a failed clone disk. The odds are astonomical against it being unrelated.

Any thing else to try, is reballing it a successful long term solution, or prone to fail again more quickly like reported with the T4x GPU problems?

[Orclas]

Try this:

1. Low level format the target disk
2. Then attempt the cloning again, as RBS says, target disk has to be in the standard HDD bay

For a bit more background to why I suggest this, se my posts here and here.

I can't say for sure that it will help, but it's worth a try.

[Oro]

Hi Orclas,

Thanks for the reply. But now my problem is nothing is recognized by HDD0 - target disk, original disk, any disk. Until I can get that sorted (if it's even possible), I can't try a cloning procedure at all.

[Orclas]

Don't worry yet

Put the target disk in the HDD cage (and leave the source disk out of the machine altogether and for peace of mind when hitting "wipe" ), fire up UBCD (or some other bootable wipe program/utility toolbox) and see if it sees the disk and if so, then just wipe it. If you get UBCD, you can also launch Parted Magic, which runs from a full GUI Linux instance, and poke around for the HDD.

If you use UBCD, there are instructions on how to create a bootable USB stick in the FAQ (there's a built in function for it). And nvm the UBCD boot management tools - nothing there helped me when I had boot after cloning problems.

I may add that (if I remember correctly), the problem I had was basically similar to yours, HDD0 not seen and listed in the boot menu.

I think part of the current confusion on the machine has to do with boot flags, the fact that Windows lists the drive which is booted from as C: (no matter what it may have been before) etc. Wish I had more in depth knowledge, but I'm an amateur tech...

Edit:

If you want to make sure that your original system HD is still functional, then put it in the main bay, remove any other drives, remove battery+AC and press the power button a few times, then attach power and try to boot. If this fails, there's some reset function where you remove all power and hold the power button down for x seconds 10-15 times. Don't remember the details, had some problem and was advised to do so by some of the real techs here, probably Ajkula or RBS.

Edit2 (note that the HDD should be removed):

Let's try this old trick:

Remove the battery, hard and media drive, unplug the AC adapter.

Press the "power" button ten times in a row, holding it down for 10 seconds each time and thirty seconds the last time around.

Plug the AC adapter - but nothing else - back in and try to power on.

[Oro]

Let's try this old trick:

Remove the battery, hard and media drive, unplug the AC adapter.

Press the "power" button ten times in a row, holding it down for 10 seconds each time and thirty seconds the last time around.

Plug the AC adapter - but nothing else - back in and try to power on.

Ah, praise be. This finally worked; nothing else did. Thank you Orclas! I have not seen that trick mentioned anywhere else after lots of searching and forum threads, and Lenovo support. Very important.

I have the drive back now, so I will work on properly cloning it. I have the target drive formatted/clean. I think now I need to:

1) Create a USB to boot windows (downloaded Wintoflash to attempt that)
2) boot with that, then launch Reflect from C: drive mounted in ultrabay
3) Copy to target drive in main bay.

Correct?

Thanks again!

[RealBlackStuff]

It suffices to just hold down the power button ONCE for about 20 seconds...

[Orclas]

It suffices to just hold down the power button ONCE for about 20 seconds...

I'll let you and good Ajkula argue about that

Ah, praise be. This finally worked; nothing else did. Thank you Orclas! I have not seen that trick mentioned anywhere else after lots of searching and forum threads, and Lenovo support. Very important.

I have the drive back now, so I will work on properly cloning it. I have the target drive formatted/clean. I think now I need to:

1) Create a USB to boot windows (downloaded Wintoflash to attempt that)
2) boot with that, then launch Reflect from C: drive mounted in ultrabay
3) Copy to target drive in main bay.

Correct?

Thanks again!

Glad I could help, particularly since I actually don't really know that much. The proper, or at least additional, thanks should go to folks like RBS and Ajkula (and a few others), who tirelessly share their profound knowledge, making copy-paste guys like me look like we have a clue

As for the process, I can't say not correct, but I have never used a clone program which launches from Windows and it seems a bit awkward to me, particularly to clone a disk from which you're running an OS and an application.

Myself I have always used bootable cloning applications, EaseUs (freeware) and variants of Acronis which I've downloaded from HD makers and is locked down in such a way that at least one disk of the brand has to be present in order for it to work (in my case it's been Seagate and Intel). I really liked Intel's latest variant, which even had a practical create-bootable-usb function.

Not to say that Reflect isn't good enough, but my gut feeling would be that a bootable cloning program would do a better job at bit-by-bit disk-to-disk.

[Oro]

Pardon my ignorance, do I put the bootable clone program on a USB stick, or what? I've read directions and there seems many ways to do this, and the first one I tried damaged my system. I'm all for the simplest and most secure, and that is reliable with any Thinkpad quirks.

Is there a sticky or thread somewhere on this? I had checked various TPF FAQs but not seen one.

[Orclas]

Yes, you put it on a USB stick. It's however not a matter of saving it to the USB, instead it has to be written to an empty stick in such a way that its recognized as a boot drive by the bios. As mentioned, some utility programs come with this function built in, for Linux stuff (and a some utility tools) theres UNetbootin. There's one tool from - if I remember correctly - HP (probably this) which I've also used successfully, but I have it on my stationary computer at home and am on a long weekend on the country side, so can't check and verify.

I can't see how a safe application could damage your system, it's doing the same thing as floppies and bootable CDs do, just faster and more convenient, and you could by all means just create a bootable CD with the cloning application as well.

What brand/s are your original and new disk and have you checked if the manufacturer supplies any cloning utility?

[Oro]

I appreciate your detailed and articulate reply. I understand how I need to make the USB bootable and not just a place I recorded a program to. I hope to have the time to try that tomorrow.

The damage was from using Reflect as instructed. It zapped my system such that I could not use my main drive for days until I had your reference to how to do a deep reset.

My "main" drive is the original drive, a 40mb Toshiba. The "target" drive is a later 80mb Samsung. I did try to get a maker- specific utility; but all Samsung products now seem to be covered by Seagate, and "Seatools" seems to not cover this procedure. I assume this is a personal affront since I used to work for LG (joke. I did use to work for LG, though).

[Orclas]

Most likely all your troubles up to now are due to your past at LG

I actually don't think it was using Reflect that was the problem, it was that the TPs have some odd behaviour when cloning HDDs in the wrong direction, i.e. from main slot to secondary slot/USB drive. Remember, I had pretty much the same troubles myself and most likely part due to indeed doing so first (from main slot to USB attached drive).

Seagate does have a tool, but whether it works for Samsung branded drives, I don't know. It's the one I've used for Seagate drives though, a few years ago.

And sorry about the overly detailed description, it's sometimes hard to tell the knowledge level of people and I rather get more detail down than less.

[cadillacmike68]

Most likely all your troubles up to now are due to your past at LG

I actually don't think it was using Reflect that was the problem, it was that the TPs have some odd behaviour when cloning HDDs in the wrong direction, i.e. from main slot to secondary slot/USB drive. Remember, I had pretty much the same troubles myself and most likely part due to indeed doing so first (from main slot to USB attached drive).

Seagate does have a tool, but whether it works for Samsung branded drives, I don't know. It's the one I've used for Seagate drives though, a few years ago.

And sorry about the overly detailed description, it's sometimes hard to tell the knowledge level of people and I rather get more detail down than less.

I have cloned at least 50, yes FIFTY HDDs on several ThinkPad T series with the source HDD in the main bay.

What you CANNOT do is clone to a HDD in a USB. Windows sees the USB as a non-bootable device and "fixes" the HDDs MBR to keep it that way. That is the ONLY limitation on cloning, the target must be in a bootable HDD bay, be it the main bay, the Thinkpad's ultrabay, or a full size dock's ultrabay.

I use using Acronis True Image, and cannot comment on the capabilities of reflect or ghost, but it does seen that reflect tripped a byte in oro's Thinkpad causing the above described fault. Acronis TI has never done that to me.

[mbr12]

My T43 also wouldn't detect the hd. I tried the 20 second thing and the hd was detected in the bios, but only briefly. Then again stopped detecting the hd and trying the 20 second trick no longer worked.
Any ideas?

[tomliotta]

I was looking through the forum because I have a HDD in an UltraBay caddy that's not being recognized. But I joined because I saw various posts claiming that (1) cloning can't be done from Windows while Windows is running, (2) the target must be in the main HDD bay and (3) that cloning can't be done to a USB HDD.

All three are false. That particular combination is the only way I've done it successfully on Txx Thinkpads so far. This T42 I'm using right now is running off of a 80GB HDD that I cloned from its original 40GB HDD. I used a cheap (hmmm... $9.00?) HDD USB adapter and HDClone 4.3 Free Edition. I ran HDClone from its desktop icon after installing it.

I'm preparing to clone another T42 by using the UltraBay HDD caddy, but it's not going well (yet). I think I know why not, so I'm not (yet) needing a solution for that. Just wanted add my comments.