Broken hard disk controller? HD not recognised.

[milkyjoe]

I recently bought a thinkpad T41 from ebay, and have had some difficulty getting it to pick up any hard disks I insert. The first time I tried to install windows xp, the installer did see a hard disk there. However the install screwed up and I had to restart and try again. Now the thinkpad won't recognise any hard disk I put into it (I have tried unbuntu and suse live cds to see if they can recognise it). Is there somewhere in the thinkpad bios to do with IDE devices? I can't see one.

The hard disks I used were:
Hitachi travelstar 60GB
Hitachi travelstar 160GB

(these were just what I had to hand)

Both hard disks worked fine on other machines. The CD drive on the thinkpad also still works. So, any suggestions as to what's wrong or any further steps I could take? Is the hd controller busted?

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.

[poshgeordie]

Hi and welcome to the forums.

Have a look at this post for suggestions.

Also I think I read somewhere that it's not unknown for there to be broken solder joints on the HDD connector pins onto the motherboard, but I could be wrong.

[andyP]

@milkyjoe,

do you have the hard drive in it's caddy? If it's not in a caddy this can sometimes cause the problems you describe.

[richk]

Upside down looks like that. The label goes down

[SteveS]

Do you have the correct screws in the caddy?
I had the very same symptoms once. It turned out that the drive connector was not fully engaged, even though the drive cover appeared to be fully seated.

Turned out that the non-genuine copy caddies I bought on e-bay had the wrong screw types. The shape and dimensions of the screw head serve an important alignment function in T4x series. The correct screws have what is known as a “pancake head” – flat on top and the bottom surface that snugs the caddy to the drive. These are not common screws, and many of the “copy cat” caddies use a flat head screw with tapered sides. These don’t work and in my opinion are only worthy of going into the steel recycle bin.