T43 intermittent recognition of hard drive on boot up...

[the5thw]

2686 DGU belonged to a friend who got it from an IBM employee--company computer with a mac address assigned. BIOS 1.22, Embedded Controller 1.06. He claimed he had to tap it to get the hard drive recognized--that the impact protection was "reversed". I was able to install several XP Pro SP3 distributions that I've tested. They would run for 20 min and bluescreen. Although the 60 GB hitachi tests impact damage, it has been running for a week on my old Dell Latitude. Working Hard drive I got with a T42p also was not recognized by the BIOS. Unless someone has had the same experience, which I can't find here, I'm going to give back this very fine looking laptop.

Sincere thanks to anyone who can help with this.

[sjthinkpader]

If the HDD is tested ok, then there could be a bad solder joint somewhere. The SATA/IDE channel is in the Southbridge. Start looking from there.

[the5thw]

Thanks, that sounds right, given the guy was tapping a particular spot just off the upper right hand corner of the touchpad, which would coincide with the hard drive connector.

I will investigate the board and post the results. Really appreciate the help.