Has anyone tried an SSD in the X24?

[Wilstn]

I have tried tinkering with a IDE 32GB SSD (Phison chipset) but it does not work out too well for the Windows XP.

Steps taken were formatting and loading a XP image on the SSD, but when booting up, it would display an error message: "NTLDR is missing". Using SYS C: will get to the C:> prompt. All the XP files and directories are visible and available on the single partitioned SSD. DOS commands also executed just like it would on a normal c drive.

But using the XP installation CD to setup Windows instead, will hang the system at "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" and will not proceed any further, CD-ROM drive will then stop spinning.

Now, should I try to use grub or nlite, will that be the right approach, has anyone been successful?

I would also be much appreciated, if somebody could provide a suggestion or link on how this might work.

[sjthinkpader]

If there is a master/slave jumper on this SSD, try one of the other positions.

[Wilstn]

I have studied the drive in detail, there is no master/slave jumper on it.

But today I tried to put the drive into another laptop, which was the Toshiba Portege and XP installed smoothly. The Portege was able to boot and run XP on this same SSD drive without a hiccup.

I put the drive back to the Thinkpad and again the message "NTLDR is missing" appeared. Windows setup was stuck at the same position just like first time.

Now it greatly puzzles me ... Thinkpad BIOS seems to be capable of recognizing the drive perfectly well under DOS but not Windows XP??

[sjthinkpader]

You may want to format it as NTFS first. If the Recovery partition is on the drive, try to do a F11 recovery.

[sojourner]

Sounds to me like the bootloader section in the MBR is confused. Have you tried booting from the CD and doing a repair from the command prompt?

I'd try that by first doing a FIXMBR at the prompt, if still no joy do a FIXBOOT.

[Wilstn]

To give a better understanding. Since Windows setup is unable to startup on this laptop, so I transferred the drive over to the Portege and invoked FIXBOOT followed by FIXMBR. It did'nt vanish the NTLDR error message. I tried that before getting on to SYS yesterday .

Noticed also that the on board bios version will not read any drive greater than 80GB, but still unsure whether there will be any impact, although my SSD is just 32GB.

It is becoming evident that the bios might be playing a major role, perhaps also the embedded controller, someone in the know may enlighten further.

I am keen to try the NTFS format next.