Toshiba MK8025GAX won't boot on T41

[invisibleman]

I've got a hard drive form deal Dell notebook - MK8026GAX. Decided to upgrade Hitachi Travelstar 60GB HDD on my T41 2378DEU. Used 4 recovery media CDs which came with the notebook.

Installation process goes fine, everything finishes, last message is to remove CD and reboot. After reboot I see blinking cursor on upper left side and that's all. No boot.

I've done some research over web and seems I've stepped on a landmine with non/IBM compatible hard drive. Is this the case?

Surprisingly enough, another 60GB hard drive from Western Digital - WD600UE-22HCT0 does not have any problems with booting.

So, I have two questions:

1. Is there anything can be done with the Toshiba drive to make it bootable with my T41?
2. If not, could you recommend off the shelf 100-120GB hard drive which is quite, does not have clicking or other noise problems and fast enough at the same time?

Thanks.

[jimmy274]

Actually, the non-ibm-disk-drive problem appears only on T43s - the T40-T42 are fine with that.
I had a similar problem with one of my older disks (Hitachi 40gb) and a T23. There was no way to start Windows with it (or the 2nd part of the setup - it wouldn't boot at all). After 2 days of frustrations, I deleted the partition on it, made a new one and reformatted - it worked like a charm.
It appears that if you've formatted a disk which was in a USB enclosure, it wont boot (the filesystem is somehow different, or something like that), so do the following - first delete the partition(s) on the drive, make new one(s) and reformat. Then start installing - I bet it will work...

[invisibleman]

if you've formatted a disk which was in a USB enclosure, it wont boot (the filesystem is somehow different, or something like that), so do the following - first delete the partition(s) on the drive, make new one(s) and reformat. Then start installing - I bet it will work...

As I said, hdd came from Dell. Dell also has Predesktop area version on its notebooks where they put diagnostic information. When I installed HDD on thinkpad first time Recovery CD's did not format the hard drive correctly. Than I put it in usb enclosure and blanked out entire HDD using Paragon Disk wiper - it simply fills whole hard drive with 0. However, I did not formatted it after wiping out - installed it and it did not work.

So, what would you suggest the action plan here to be? Boot thinkpad from old hard drive, delete partition information on Toshiba, create partition on it and than move in inside the notebook and try to install it again?

Why would partition matter if Recovery CDs completely overwrite partition info when they install OS?

[jimmy274]

Look, just trust me - install your Toshiba in your ThinkPad, set the BIOS to boot from CD, use Hiren BootCD or Partition Magic or something else to COMPLETELY erase all the partitions on Toshiba drive and make new ones (you could need a restart between).
Then install Windows from recovery CDs... Don't do anything with Toshiba in USB enclosure or it wouldn't boot.
Bottomline - whatever you do, erase all the partitions on that disk first, but do that when the disk is installed in the ThinkPad, not via USB or whatever. Also make new partitions with any program you like, just as long as you make them while the disk is in the ThinkPad, not in the USB enclosure. The same goes for formatting...
Trust me, been there, done that - this was the only way to do it right.

[Kyocera]

I agree with jimmy274, wipe the drive with something then do the recovery with the drive in the thinkpad.

[chan_man]

Boot the old harddrive, put the "new" drive into either an external USB enclosure or the second HDD adapter (replaces Optical drive). Go to Control Panel, Administrator Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management. You should see both HDDs in your system. Pick the "new" HDD (should be DISK 1, your primary drive is DISK 0) and see if you can delete the partition. If not, you will have to get something like Acronis Drive Suite to delete the partition. I have a floppy disk with something called WIPEDISK that was real simple, what ever drives were in a machine would be wiped out if you booted this disk in the floppy drive. I used this often to remove partitions when I am re-using HDDs in a laptop, this way I can boot any environment depending on what drive I put in.

[zdriver]

I'll bet all that is wrong is the Master Boot Record on the new hard drive. There are many ways to fix it, one of the quickest is to boot from an XP install cd, select repair and let the recovery console start, then run fix mbr.
I would still follow the above suggestions and start with an unallocated drive when you run the resore cd's so that it creates the hidden partition and all will be normal.

[invisibleman]

jimmy274,

Thank you. The method you've suggested did work, it is finishing customization now.

My next question is regarding data recovery using R&R. The software I'm going to install on new hard drive is about 20GB and takes me at least one full day (10 hours or more) to install and configure it.

Is there an option for R&R (the latest is 4.2 if I'm not mistaken) once all software installation is finished to backup whole HDD with all OS/software installed on bootable USB drive?

So next time when I want to restore my OS/software I'll need to attach that USB drive, boot from it and restore drive in its original configuration. After that I can restore my private data from another media/hdd.

So, can be above requirement archived using only R&R w/o using any other third-party software?

[jimmy274]

Great! I do know that I was pulling my hair out for 2 days, and then just went clean install and everything worked
I'm glad you've got it going.
About the R&R - I can't help you there, since I'm not using it - I'm doing the thing you said with Acronis True Image Home v.10.0 and I don't think it can get any simpler than that... or maybe I'm just used to it - I dunno...

[chan_man]

I would have to agree, Acronis True Image Home is one of the easiest ways of backing up a drive and restoring. I have used this to recover my T42P why the HDD was starting to fail. Got a larger drive and put everything back, don't have to worry about loosing any programs, data etc. Just use a USB external drive to store the image and incremental backups.