Replacing hard drive in T43

[patfla]

Hi,

There seems to be a lot of stuff here about replacing Thinkpad hard drives (with non Thinkpad option harddrives - that is, 3rd-party or whatever).

Kind of hard to sort it all out, so let me ask the question directly. What would be involved in the replacing the 40GB 5400 rpm drive that comes standard with a T43 2687D4U with one of the 80 or 100GB 7200 drives as seen here:

http://www.drivesolutions.com/cgi-bin/s ... ype=Laptop

Appreciate your help (and hope not to generate another long and confusing
thread on the subject).

pat

[/u]

[nrj45]

Just be aware that some harddrive will make your t43 display the 2010 error...

Personnaly i have a toshiba 1032GAX (100gb / 5400rpm / 16mb cache) instead of the original 7200rpm 60gb. I have the 2010 error msg but since i rarely reboot my t43p (i mostly use standby and i reboot it about once per week) the error msg don't bother me a lot. It would be nicer if it wasn't here but it's not apocalypse

[patfla]

thanx nrj45.

I printed out and then sat down and read the sticky named

'Problems with non-thinkpad option drives on T43 thinkpads'

more closely.

Actually it looks to me like the issue can possbily be easily summed up.

There is, specific to the T43 (as opposed to, say, the T42) and a handful of other non-T (but new) machines a special chip to convert from PATA (old IDE) to SATA. Meaning that SATA is the principal hard drive bus in the T32. The conversion chip is added for backwards compatability. That is, you can put a PATA/IDE drive into the primarly slot and it will work.

The problem is (but this hasn't been diretly confirmed) that to do it right, and not provoke the 2010 error, your disk needs special firmware modifications. And to do this after-the-fact is complicated by some drives not containing EPROMs (writeable) but PROMs.

Most people who add the 3rd part drive and get the error, just ESC past it and they seem to be OK.

BUT NOT ALL, I think I saw at least a few people who had real problems with their disks as a result.

So it seems to me a crap-shoot.

It would be nice if there was someone out there who could hack the firmware (but after some looking, haven't found this yet).

I consider this risk serious enough to forstall any T43 purchase (or at least until one with a decent sized 7200 rpm drive comes out with a decent price).

If you look elsewhere, I just got over being burned on my first Thinkpad purchase, a 'Certified Used' T42. I didn't loose any money, but I did loose time and a defective machine and, as a result, have no laptop. But then I don't absolutely need one and so that's OK.

So far as I'm concerned, this constitutes a second 'strike' against IBM. I've been watching Thinkpads for yrs but may finally give up the quest (without a purchase).

I might that I learned also that as regards the problem I had with my Certified Used T42. A yr ago, or whatever it was, before Thinkpad was Lenovo, and still IBM, this would have been fixed and the machine returned. The new, and much less attractive policy, is a change that Lenovo has made.

And this has prompted me to give Dells a second look.

pat