Problems with new Seagate 500GB drive

[Oaklodge]

I have a T60P. I've just got hold of a new 500GB (7K) drive from seagate.

The new drive is in the expansion slot in the laptop (replacing the DVD).
When the laptop is in the small doc and I power on, press F12 to bring up boot options I always get an error saying that the 500GB drive failed to initialize.

If I boot up from the main drive, the 500GB drive is seen just fine by the OS.
If I place the 500GB in the main drive bay, it boots just fine.

I just can not boot off it when its in the doc and in the expansion slot.

I also note that when the laptop is not in the doc, pressing f12 take quite a while for it to display the list of drives.

I have two of the new 500GB drives and both have the same issue when the laptop is in the doc.

Any ideas please ?

[Marin85]

You probably have to initialize the drive first. Try this and post back how it goes.

Good luck

Marin

[Oaklodge]

Nice, idea - I've already done that, formated and installed OS while the new drive was in the MAIN drive bay on the laptop. I only have problems with the drive in the ultrabay. Other drives in the ultrabay are fine. So it seems to be some sort of drive issue.

[jayk]

I've got a similar problem. I received the drive last week (the same 7200.4 Momentus as you) and I've been trying for a couple of days to clone my old disk onto it. I've tried both Acronis True Image 11 and the latest Diskwizard from Seagate (which is really just their private-labele version of True Image). The cloning seems to work just fine (it takes several hours and it says it's successful at the end), but when I try to boot to the new drive the machine just freezes. I've tried going into the Windows Recovery Console (my disk has XP SP 3, and even though although I only have a SP 2 boot disk it seems to work ok) and when I run FIXMBR it tells me there's something wrong with my MBR and asks if I want to repair it. I say yes and then reboot, but I get the same behavior (the machine just dies when it tries to boot off the new disk). I just posted something on the Seagate forums about this... hopefully that will get me some help.

[Oaklodge]

Strange ... today I have been able to boot off my drive and bring up the boot list (F12) without any problems ... I need to do a little more playing and see what happens.

[RonS]

Where did you find your 7200.4 in stock? I can find them anywhere... most vendors are saying out of stock until the last week of the month.

[Oaklodge]

provantage briefly had stock of about 140 units, sold out now until 1st week of march.

[jayk]

I figured it out... I had to do the mirror operation with the new/destination drive installed in the Thinkpad (and the old/souce one installed in the external USB-to-SATA housing). When I was researching the problem I came across a post someplace the said this had to do with the low-level configuration (sectors/tracks/etc) being different in the Thinkpad than in most USB-to-SATA adapters, but I never found a good explanation of this. In any case, the new drive is working fine now.