Help: 7K100 Compatibility with X32?

[Ken Fox]

As I posted on a couple of earlier threads, I'd ordered a T43 closeout from Lenovo that I ended up canceling due to production delays. Unfortunately, since I expected it to arrive this week, I ordered a new series Hitachi 7200rpm PATA drive for it (HTS721010G9AT00) 100gb, as well as a gig of extra DDR2 RAM. The RAM has to go back unless I buy some other system that can use it, but rather than return the new hard drive I decided to put it into my 1.8ghz 1.5gb containing X32.

I formatted the HD using my desktop machine, with one of those USB2 adapters with its own power source; the cluster size I chose was 512. This went well. Then I installed the HD in my X32, which has been recognized by the bios. Then, I used a ghost file copy of the entire old drive (an older series 60gb 7200rpm Hitachi, the HTS72606M9AT00) with a USB floppy onto the new 100gb HD mounted in the X32. Everything went well. I had previously verified the integrity of the ghost file with Ghost 2003.

On boot up after putting the image on the new drive, the machine goes through its bios checks and gets to the point where the HD should kick in, should boot XP, and then all I get is a blinking cursor on the top left. I tried this twice, and I had the bios bootup in diagnostic mode and there appear to be no problems. I also went through the bios and there are no apparent changes nor any weird settings; the HD appears to be recognized.

OK, well I have a Rescue and Recovery set from last week, so I tried installing that. The initial disk runs fine through my USB DVD/CD drive, and it gets to the point where it asks you to remove that disk and reboot (the process takes maybe 20-25 minutes up to this point). At this point the HD is supposed to have enough on it to boot itself into the recovery space and to demand the first backup disk, however what I get is a flashing cursor, upper left, like after the ghost image file installation; no bootup.

At this point I can think of several possible causes and several more things to try, but maybe there is something obvious I have missed. I could take an original Win XP disk and use it just to format the disk inside of the X32, then try reinstalling the ghost image or the R&R set. I could further test the HD outside of the machine with an adapter or in the ultrabase of my T42, although the drive does not act as though it is defective considering that it is recognized by the bios of the X32, was recognized and formatted by my desktop machine, and has accepted reimaging by ghost twice with no error messages, plus the first disk of an R&R set.

Possible other courses of action I can think of include putting the image back on the drive in my T42 (with everything included in the system bus and no USB devices), e.g. with the ultrabay optical device and putting the HD into the T42's HD space. I could flash the firmware of the new HD in the T42 using the instructions given for T43 non-IBM options HDs, being as I've already burned the CD needed.

Finally, I can just return the HD too as defective.

Does anyone know another solution I've overlooked, or is this drive simply incompatible with the X32 system? I think I have read other posts here from people using this drive in this system however.

Any suggestions are most welcome.

ken

[Ken Fox]

As a follow-on from my first post, I tried a native WinXP install from a CD and the system installed and was able to boot from the Hitachi 100gb 7200rpm drive. I have to conclude that for some reason unknown to me, formatting this drive outside of this notebook did not produce a bootable drive even if the drive contents I put on it came out of this drive originally,

I'll reload the ghost image of the drive I put on previously and see if this resolves all problems. I have formatted Thinkpad and other notebook drives outside of their notebooks before and not had any issues. Is there a reason why this can be problematical?

ken

[Ken Fox]

As a follow-on from my first post, I tried a native WinXP install from a CD and the system installed and was able to boot from the Hitachi 100gb 7200rpm drive. I have to conclude that for some reason unknown to me, formatting this drive outside of this notebook did not produce a bootable drive even if the drive contents I put on it came out of this drive originally,

I'll reload the ghost image of the drive I put on previously and see if this resolves all problems. I have formatted Thinkpad and other notebook drives outside of their notebooks before and not had any issues. Is there a reason why this can be problematical?

ken

Further followup: It appears that WinXP can be loaded onto the laptop as a fresh install and it will boot from the HD, at least once or twice. If I put the drive contents back on with either Norton Ghost (via USB hard drive) or Thinkvantage R&R via USB optical drive, it will NOT boot from the HD. Have tried this so many times and with several disk formats that there is obviously a problem. Yet, with a fresh Windoze install it appears to work.

Have checked the system bios; it is 3.02 and the embedded controller version is 1.08, both the latest available.

I'm tempted to flash the HD firmware in my T42 using the T42 ultrabay cd rom. I would have had to do this before if I was going to put it into the T43 I was planning to purchase.

The hard drive firmware CD from Lenovo claims to support this HD, and mentions the X32 as a supported system (although not for updating the firmware with the CD via USB drive, nor do they state that all of the hard drives are necessarily supported on all the listed Thinkpad systems.

I don't want to do a complete fresh install of all my software, much of which would require activation and will be an enormous PITA.

I'm almost stumped.

ken

[magnusansky]

I have nothing to add, but I just found this thread and find the information very useful as I just received a 7K100 for my X32.

Thanks for all the useful information and I hope someone can help you (and perhaps us) out.

As for my plan...I haven't decided if I'm going to chicken out and do a fresh install or go the full-copy route.

[Ken Fox]

I have nothing to add, but I just found this thread and find the information very useful as I just received a 7K100 for my X32.

Thanks for all the useful information and I hope someone can help you (and perhaps us) out.

As for my plan...I haven't decided if I'm going to chicken out and do a fresh install or go the full-copy route.

This is the thread you need to read:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=35194

If your experience is anything like mine, you may find it necessary to go through a few additional steps in order to end up with a 7K100 that boots and works right. If you use Rescue and Recovery, or an imaging program like Norton Ghost 2003, it is likely that you'll need to repair the Master Boot Record. Read through the linked thread and if you have any more questions, I'll try to answer them.

ken

[magnusansky]

Thanks for the link, Ken.

It'll still be a couple days (after the 3rd) before I get to try my hand at all this.

[_erazor_]

all you need to do is activate the partition. XP can only boot from active partitions. if you only move an image to a HD then that does not happen with most imaging software.

[Ken Fox]

all you need to do is activate the partition. XP can only boot from active partitions. if you only move an image to a HD then that does not happen with most imaging software.

If you image the WHOLE DISK, and not a single partition, the MBR should be imaged as well. I have done this literally 50-100 times with different hard disks over the last 10 years and never had a problem until this one time. This time I had the problem mentioned in this and another thread regardless of whether I used generic imaging software (ghost 2003) or Lenovo's Thinkvantage Rescue and Recovery v 3.1, and with both a T4x and an X32.

Therefore, there is some specific problem in some cloning operations between (at least) a 7K60 and 7K100 hard disk.

[Ken Fox]

as I noted in another thread, I must reverse myself because I DO believe that part of my problems were with not using the "-1b" switch in Ghost 2003, which will, on a thinkpad, result in a corrupted MBR in the cloned disk. This can be repaired with the MBR repair utility downloadable from the Lenovo site, and referenced in other recent threads on this topic I have participated in. But, to be sure, it would be better to just use the -1b switch to begin with and avoid the problem.

Nonetheless, R&R 3.1 produced the same result on two machines (T42 and X32), a corrupted MBR, when going from a 7K60 60gb drive to a 7K100 100gb drive, so there is more to this problem than simply Norton Ghost and failing to use the -1b switch.