Help using a 1 TB HDD in T61 – is it an AHCI driver issue?

[acz]

Help using a 1 TB HDD in T61 – is it an AHCI driver issue?

I have a trusty Thinkpad T61 that was built in August 1997. It came with Win XP and a 100 GB hard drive.
Some years later, I bought a 320 GB drive, and did a clean install of Win 7. That has been working pretty well for a long time, and of course I kept it up to date with Microsoft’s many patches.
Now, Windows Update has stopped working and the deadline for Win 10 is looming, so I thought I would get ready for Windows 10, by doing the following.

1. Bought a brand new 1 Terabyte HGST HDD.
2. Cloned the 320 GB to the new 1 TB drive using an external HDD dock connected by USB, using AOMEI Backupper software.

Well, that went smoothly, with no apparent errors. The old drive was partitioned into a C, D, E drive of roughly 100 GB each; the new drive also has C, D, E disks of roughly 300 GB each.

However, when I swap out the old and the new drive, the new one behaves erratically. The system seems slower, Windows Update gives an error message that I have never seen before, some web sites will not load.
After reading in various online forums about “Intel Rapid Storage Driver”, I wonder if my IDE drivers are too old to handle the 1 TB unit.

Here is what I see in Device Manager:

IDE/ATA ATAPI controllers
- ATA Channel 0
- Intel ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Controllers 2850
- Intel ICH8M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller

When I click Properties and then the Driver tab, I can find the version number for each of those entries.

The first two are provided by Microsoft, dated 6/21/2006, version 6.1.7601.18231
and the
third one (SATA AHCI) is provided by Intel, dated 8/7/2009, version 8.9.2.1002

I would appreciate advice from anyone in this great forum who has been down this path and successfully installed a 1 TB HDD in an older Thinkpad running Windows 7.
Thank you!

[Johan]

Not sure whether this is any help, but nonetheless:

- have you set the HDD to be "AHCI" (and not "Compatibility") in the BIOS?

- try see the thread Intel Storage Driver, compatibility issues?... maybe of relevance?

- Intel has a "Driver Update Utility" which may perhaps be useful; see Intel Driver Update Utility.

Now, Windows Update has stopped working...

What? Windows Update should certainly still work for Windows 7! You may however be troubled by Microsoft apparently having reduced the priority for Windows 7-updates; see e.g. W7/SP1 Windows Update stuck checking for updates and many similar threads on the internet.

Johan

[cadillacmike68]

If you are still stuck, go get a cheap 160-300 GB drive and restore to that. Or find your old 100GB drive and restore to that. You can always figure out the 1TB drive's issues later.

I have two of those 1TB HGST drives, but I don't use them as boot drives, they are my D: drives for storing backups and movies, etc. You do have to have ACHI on as Johan noted, and win 7 updates are slow.


T61 from 1997? must have been a typo.

[dr_st]

Sounds like the typical issue of cloning an existing windows installation from a regular to an advanced format drive.

Read here:
https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/v ... ed-format/

Granted, with Win7, the patch should have already been included in SP1, but I never tested it myself. And it definitely sounds like you need a newer version of the Intel RST driver.

Also, I am not familiar with your backup software, and whether it recognizes advanced format drives and knows to align the partition to 4K. I know, for instance, that with Acronis, the 2011 release could not, but the 2014 did so just fine.