R40 HDD not recognized story

[vanaya]

Just before X-Mas, I was giving an R31 to a family member as a gift. I didn't have any spare decent size HDD so I borrowed the 80gb 5400rpm HDD from my R40 (2896-GZU). This is when my R40 began to show symptoms of not recognizing any HDDs. The only two HDD I had left was a 40gb and 20gb 4200rpm, so I installed the 40gb and tried to run DBAN. It failed with non-fatal errors. No problem I thought, this was going to be temporary till I find a good deal. Tried the 20gb, and again it failed to run DBAN. Ok, I'll just run the recovery disks and format the drive from there. Nope! The recovery disks would just show the first blue prompt that was blank. I knew this wasn't right as I had used the recovery disks many times and the first blue prompt states something like the version number and press enter to proceed. I then inserted the 20gb and the same thing happened, blue prompt that was blank. Ok, changed cd-rw to dvd-rom, same results with both drives. One of the drives was Hitachi, so I tried to run the Hitachi DFT. When the lappy booted, it would just stall after "Starting DOS" cursor. I downloaded the IBM Secure Data Disposal and the same cursor after Starting DOS" would laugh at me. I gave up on it, and took a few weeks off.

I got a good deal on a 60gb 7200rpm here on the marketplace (Thanks sjthinkpader) and started from scratch. Booted to PC Doctor and ran all tests, passed. Inserted the drive and again, the lappy would blink at starting DOS... I began to disassemble. I figured it had to start at the EIDE connector and sure enough, the culprit!! Probably due to the so many plugins an unplugs of HDD's. On the back of the EIDE connector (looking down) the last two contacts had been pushed out. I pushed them back in and success!! I tested the drive with no keyboard bezel and ran the Hitachi DFT, recognized and passed with no errors. Assembled it completely and another DFT test successful. Sorry for the long post, but hopefully it will help someone in the future.

[sjthinkpader]

Enjoy your new found performance.