Hard drives for T30

Message

Keitho81 · #1 Post by **Keitho81** » Wed Sep 13, 2006 6:27 am

Hey.

I'm wondering if anybody can shed any light on my situation. I have 2 x Seagate Momentus 5400.2 40gb hard drives which were bought new to be installed into 2 x IBM T30 laptops. When the hard drives were installed the laptop would not pick them up and when I tried to run FDISK I got an error message stating that there was no fixed disk present.
I tried one of these drives in a T43 laptop and it gave me an error message stating " the drives was not a qualified drive or that the firmware needed to be updated".
I have tried to update the firmware on the drives but am told by the DOS applicationt hat the drives are at the highest firmware standard. ALso both T30 laptops I have been told, have the current BIOS version on them.

Has anybody had any problems like this before and can you shed any info at all!?!?!

FragrantHead · #2 Post by **FragrantHead** » Wed Sep 13, 2006 7:44 am

I've used various IBM/Hitachi drives up to 100GB, 7200RPM as the main drive and some Seagate Momentus 40GB 4200RPM, among others, in the Ultrabay, all without problems in my T30. A drive may not be recognised when it has a hard disk password, for example when you hot-swap it in the Ultrabay under Win2k. New drives should not have a password though and if they did the T30 should ask for it after power on, before booting. I don't suppose your new drives are serial ATA? Never had one and imagine the connector wouldn't even fit. The T30 needs the older parallel ATA drives.

FragrantHead · #3 Post by **FragrantHead** » Wed Sep 13, 2006 7:48 am

Another thought: What about jumpers? The Hitachi drives at least have jumper pins next to the connector and may come shipped with a jumper fitted. This needs to be pulled off on the Hitachis before installation, so it becomes "Device 0".

agarza · #4 Post by **agarza** » Thu Sep 14, 2006 12:04 am

Never buy another brand than Hitachi (personal experience)

I own 5 HDD all of them are Hitachi TravelStar (20GB, 30GB, 40GB, 40GB 5400rpm, 60GB 7200rpm E7K100)

Keitho81 · #5 Post by **Keitho81** » Thu Sep 14, 2006 3:15 am

Thanks for the replies!
The drives don't have a power on password, as you said the machine would ask for it as soon as you boot it up. It also doesn't come with jumpers. I have checked an Hitachi drive which I have myself and see that it has a jumper fitted, however these seagate drives do not.

ronbo613 · #6 Post by **ronbo613** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 8:33 am

I had similar questions with hard drives for the T30. Seagates are my first pick in hard drives so I emailed them and asked them about using a Momentus in the T30. They mentioned some "compatibility" issues that made me reconsider Seagates for my T30.
You should email them and see if they can offer some advice. The person I spoke with was friendly and helpful.

Hard drives for T30

Hard drives for T30

Who is online