Help: X60s Won't recognize hard drive

[buckalho]

Dear fellow forumers,

I need some help, thought, or idea about what's going on with my machine.

Upon booting (at thinkpad logo), I get blinking hard drive light and it goes nowhere further.
It seems that the hard drive is not detected by the motherboard.

What I tried:
- Using another hard drive -- same result.
- Plug out SATA sub card and plug in back again -- sometime recognizes the drive sometime doesnt

I'm suspecting that it's either the motherboard or the sub card but I'm not really sure.


Does anybody ever had this problem before? Any thought or idea?

[Brad]

Probably a long shot but in the BIOS under the SATA settings what is selected?

Brad

[buckalho]

I tried both AHCI and compatibility but both gave the same result

[Brad]

Then I am sorry to say that I think your motherboard has failed. Hopefully your X60s is still covered under warranty.

Brad

[buckalho]

Sadly, it is out of warranty

but then, If I boot to external usb drive, everything works seamlessly, which made me thinks that the motherboard is fine.

Oh, also, if I pull out the hard drive , the machine seems to boot fine (it's just not able to find any OS to boot)

So, it's now either the hdd sub card jack in the motherboard that went wrong or the card itself.

I looked it up on ebay for the card and it cost almost $60. so I just want to be very extra cautious since
I don't want to buy it and ended up finding out that the jack on the motherboard that went bad....

Do you have any other suggestion on how I might narrow down the problem?

[91011]

Probably a longshot but I've had the flashing cursor on my X60s and was fixed using the R&R repair tool.

But your statement:
"Plug out SATA sub card and plug in back again -- sometime recognizes the drive sometime doesnt"
would indicate that it's probably not your problem. But might be worth a try.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-54483

John

[EOMtp]

buckalho: It is not clear to me from your description if you were ever able to boot from that internal drive. What you describe sounds just lke what happens if the drive's Master Boot Record (MBR) is "not quite right". Did you try to repair the MBR and check if the drive boots once it has a known good MBR? If not, do you know how to fix the MBR or do you need instructions?

[richk]

I don't want to be insulting, but it will work like that if it is upside down. (Label should be down)

[buckalho]

Hm... I guess I'm not very clear enough in explaining my problem.

So, basically this is what happens. The laptop was dropped at some height and after the accident the machine won't recognize the drive.

Curiously, I tried to plug in another hard drive because I thought that the original hard drive was damaged.
However, the other hard drive is also not recognized by the machine.
How I tested it: Hard drive check utility on the bios says that no hard drive is plugged in.

When I opened up the machine, I found out that the sata sub card can actually be detached from the motherboard (not soldered)
It looked like this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-THINKPAD-X60-X6 ... .m20.l1116

After I remove the sub card and plug it back in, the machine now recognize hard drive.
I thought the problem was solved, but later on same problem reappears after couple use.


Now, I am thinking of two possibilites:
1. the sub card was damaged
2. the motherboard was damaged.

To narrow down the problem, I tried booting the computer using my usb drive and it runs fine.
Can I assume that the motherboard isn't damaged?

Behavior when it doesn't recognize the hard drive:
When I press the power button, the hard drive light blinks periodically (every 0.5 second) and acts as if the hard drive isn't there

Behavior when it works:
same as other laptop. Hard drive light is off at least after it passes the "thinkpad screen"

I hope my clarification won't complicte things further :{

[richk]

Now I understand. The card is 92p6237. I am looking at one now and there isn't much to break on it, but a cracked solder joint is possible. I thought I might have an extra one, but the others are from a tablet. (41w1475) From a distance, they look the same, but they are different sizes