Problem Upgrading T41p Hard Drive to Seagate 80GB ST980815A

[achillesheal]

Ghosted across old 60GB Travelstar drive onto newly purchased Seagate 80GB ST980815A. When booting from new drive the machine just hangs during system startup. Tried running detailed diagnostics and everything goes along smooth until the hard drive diagnostics kick in, then the machine hangs with a cursor in the top left corner of screen.

Saw the sticky topic on the T43 issues with hard drive replacements. Is this similar? What's my solution?

Here's my machine info:
Machine model: 2373xqx
BIOS Version/Date: IBM 1RETDNWW (3.19), 2005-10-13

[BeeJayEmm]

Welcome to the forum!

Since you said "ghosted", I assume you used Norton Ghost. T41 does not have the T43 issue with replacement hard drives; any PATA drive that fits (9.5mm high) will work. That Seagate definitely should. It may be the drive is bad. Was it initialized/formatted? What diagnostic are you running and by what method? If the drive is OK, the hang on startup sounds familiar. If you use the search function above with words like "drive clone cursor", click the "search all terms" button and search, you may find your answer.

[zdriver]

Run the seagate drive diags on the new drive.
If it passes, use the seagate disc wizard software to copy the drive. If the drive is good, it's probably just a fixmbr problem.

[AIX]

I replaced my T41's old 40GB 5400 Fujitsu drive with a Seagate 80GB ST980815A drive a couple of months ago. I had absolutely no problem upgrading the drive - but I did a full (software) reinstall using the recovery CDs, not "ghosting" or anything. The drive is silent&fast.

[Specter]

I can second the proposition to use Seagates DiscWizard since you are using a Seagate drive. I just did that myself on my T42, going from an 80GB Hitachi to a 160GB Seagate.

I put the new drive in a USB enclosure and I did not initialize it in any way, no formating, no nothing. I did not have to change BIOS settings for DiscWizard to see the HPA, even though the BIOS was set to default in this regard (i.e. "Normal", which I understand means the HPA is hidden).

I found the size of the original HPA from XP:s "Disk Management" ("Control Panel"->"Administrative Tools"->"Computer Management"), and then I used the manual mode in DiscWizard to be able to set the exact same size for tha new HPA. It worked like a charm.

On another ThinkPad (T41) I used the Acronis True Image tryout (v11) in the same way, but this software did not, for whichever reason, see the HPA. The primary partition was transferred without problem however, and after switching drives the new one now works like it should.

[Brad]

Yours is a common problem which has been written about in many threads.

Try ghosting again with the target drive installed in the ThinkPad and the source drive in the USB enclosure.

Brad

[Johan]

Exactly as Brad says, this is a common problem... and has been widely discussed on this forum. If you use the Search function you will easily find releveant help. Alternatively, see the thread Ghosting new harddrive with norton ghost.

Johan