Replace 6 Gb original for a Toshiba 40 Gb

[linuxcomputers]

Installation went well but now it will not boot, the hd light stays on and the line of LED power light is on too, the bios seems to have recognised it as its listed in the component list I bought a new HD because I hopped that way I'd get a good un-worn one.

[HFat]

Hi,

Maybe you should give more information like the model of your Thinkpad are you talking about and what exactly you have done so far: installed what? how?
Have you verified your installation works at all by using an external bootloader (so to speak) such as a boot floppy that's able to launch what's on your hard drive?
There are a number of things that could go wrong.

I've upgraded my Thinkpad's hard drive and I suspect a lot of people have done the same.
Instead of going through a clean install, I simply cloned the old drive on the new one with an old version of Ghost which handled the boot process minutiae automatically.

[linuxcomputers]

6Gb and 64Mb wasn't enough storage and RAM for Linux so no supported OS from Microsoft would get close so I upgraded the RAM by two 128Mb sticks and now this HD by 34Gb.

[linuxcomputers]

I use Mandriva-Linux but something in the 2008.0 conflicts with the Toshiba controller firmware to cause grub to not boot the hard-drive at all

[linuxcomputers]

The problem goes away when you use a text boot loader rather than a graphical boot loader.