T30 Support NTFS @ Boot ?

[Walt]

I have a T30 which continues to support my needs. However, its harddrive started to fail so I decided to replace the drive.

The original was a "measly" 40G formatted as FAT32. The replacement drive I got was a "whopping" 120G.

I initially copied (cloned?) the original 40G's data onto my new 120G, specifying the new drive was to be formatted as NTFS. After completing that, I then attempted to boot from the new drive, but I got immidately an error message from BIOS saying that it doesn't recognise the drive (sorry, I forget the exact wording). Let me mention that I have the latest BIOS installed, which I believe is "27 Jun 2006 v1IET71WW (2.10)".

I played around with several copying options, some more than once, but the only one that would work (boot) was if I made a 40G partition on the new 120G drive, and formatted it as FAT32. Let me add that after doing this, I was able to create a second partition, format it as NTFS, and that works OK. It seems that having the boot partition being NTFS is the problem, not NTFS in general.

My questions are:

• Does the T30 support NTFS for a bootable disk?
• Does the T30 support a bootable drive/partition size larger than 40G (if so, how large)?

[RealBlackStuff]

I assume you also have the (matching to BIOS) Embedded Controller Program V1.07.
T30s support NTFS without any problems.
If you have a backup, you could try and convert your FAT32 partition to NTFS.
Click on Start/Run, type in CMD and hit OK.
Now type in (and watch the spaces):
CONVERT C: /fs:ntfs
and hit Enter.
Where C: is a name of the drive you want to convert.
I never had such a large HD, but considering the T30 age, it might have a limit of 132GB (but probably none).
So nothing to worry about.

[Walt]

Good point. I went back and checked. I am already using Embedded Controller Program V1.07.

I do have a backup available. My old 40G drive.

I have already tried NTFS at the full 120G, NTFS with a 80G boot partition, and NTFS with a 40G boot partition. As I mentioned, the only way I could get my new drive to work, was to do FAT32 with a 40G partition.

I am a bit hesitant to simply "CONVERT" my new working FAT32 into NTFS, because of the problems with formatting straight to NTFS I had to start with, but since I still have my old drive as a backup, possibly I could give it a try.

My main concern was if my T30 supported booting from a NTFS disk, and you answered that.

Thanks.