T23: Time for a new hard drive?

[whitebrow]

My Dad's T23 has been experiencing some issues and I think they're related to the hard drive, but I thought I'd check before spending the money on a new drive. I reinstalled XP Pro SP2 about a year ago now and I believe the problems are getting worse, which leads me away from thinking its a bad OS install. Anyway:

-Sometimes when restarting, a message will show up saying that no OS can be found. After another reboot, maybe two it'll get into windows.
-Sometimes takes quite a while to actually load windows, other times its decently quick.
-There's an issue with it not coming back from screensaver. Sometimes when it sits and the monitor turns off, it won't respond to mouse movement, the keyboard, opening or closing the lid, or the power button. Holding the power down to restart is the only solution I've found.

I can't recall anything more right now. If you think that it might be the windows install I could have him redo it.


Also, I've heard one recommendation for batteryrefill.com. Anyone else have good/bad experiences with them? The price for a new T2x battery from them seems like a pretty decent option in extending the use of this computer once these other problems get fixed.

Thanks!

EDIT - I want to say that there have been times when it will shut off on it's own, not while on battery power, but I can't remember now. Thanks again

[rkawakami]

Symptoms appear to be hard drive related (can't find OS, taking a relatively larger amount of time to load) but could also be the disk drive interface on the motherboard. Installing a different drive would tell you that fairly quickly, but if the problem IS the motherboard, then you may have wasted your money on a drive you didn't really need.

The first thing to try is to remove and then re-install the disk drive (i.e., re-seat the connection). With the laptop off, pull the drive out, inspect the pins to make sure that they are shiny and straight and then return the drive into the bay. See if that helps any. If it does, then my next suggestion would be to quickly get all of your important data off of the drive. You could use a flash drive or a network connection to do that. The reason is that you may NOT have actually solved the problem and that you should take that chance to grab your data while you can.

Assuming that this does not help, then I would say your next step would be to download a copy of PC Doctor for the T23 from here:

PC Doctor for DOS T23 (diskettes)

or here:

PC Doctor for DOS T23 (CD .ISO image)

The first link is to Lenovo's site where you can download three files, which when executed, will create three floppy disks which you then use to boot the T23 and run PC Doctor. The second link is an .ISO image that was created by someone from those same three downloaded files. I am currently hosting that .ISO file since the original site went offline a couple of months ago. You will need a program which burns the image file onto a blank CD-R (and obviously a CD burner).

When you have PC Doctor up and running, then execute the following diagnostics:

CPU/coprocessor
Memory
Disk drive

If and when you get to that point and need more help, give a shout here.

Almost forgot the question about batteryrefill.com... Yes, I have used them for 600-series batteries. You can find a couple of threads where I have posted that info before. Use the Search link at the top of the page, enter "batteryrefill*" (without the quotes; don't specify '.com', use the '*'), enter "rkawakami" in the Search for Author field and click the Search button. I have not used them for the T2x batteries as of yet. I have found an eBay seller near me that has some nearly-new T2x batteries. They use the IDs of "xreplay" and "getgoingstores" on eBay.