Found out the hard way: quirks in the 570e IDE controller.

[MsGeek-CatseyeLabs]

Hi guys,

I'm getting a ThinkPad 570e up and running for my friend Tom Reed. Tom insisted on the Evil OS, I persuaded him to take the lesser Evil and go W2K instead of XP Home/Pro.

Anyway, here's the story. I had two Toshiba 30GB drives, one installed in a caddy, the other set aside in case the other drive was bunk. (The drives were purchased on eBay after all.) I got the W2K installer going and all went well until I hit formatting. OK, yeah I want FAT...uh-huh, FAT32 is fine...then it set to work. The formatting was dog slow. I instantly thought that maybe W2K wasn't using DMA on the drive, but I knew that was something which could be fixed later. 30 minutes later, the formatting supposedly completes. I get the message "hard drive could not be formatted, might be damaged." Swell.

I turn the computer off, take it off the dock, remove the battery, and tinker with the hard drive to make sure it's seated properly. Then I try again. Same result. I figure the drive is bad, take it out of the caddy, then install the second Toshiba 30 GB drive in the caddy. Same result. I check the drive for proper seating, then do it again. Same result.

I send my friend Tom a sobby message about the whole mess. "Seems like the IDE controller might be bad." Then a friend on chat says "Try a sub-8GB partition for C:\ ."

Badabingbadabangbadaboom, it's a success. The 7GB partition formats fine, the install goes swimmingly. I send Tom a second message, that I installed W2K after partitioning the drive and giving the C:\ partition 7GB.

Now, I have a 570 as well...headless machine, same hard drive (we went in on a multiple-drive auction) and Debian Sarge/Sid. The install went perfect using a single partition for data and a second for swap, but it throws up Kernel Panics every so often as the boot process "loses" the boot partition. I thought this was a quirk I was going to have to live with. Instead, I'm going to reinstall with a 7GB root partition and the rest for /home. Hopefully that will banish the intermittent Kernel Panics.

Moral: The 570/570e IDE controller wants to see the boot files in a partition smaller than 8GB. It's the same quirk that exists with the 600e...I suspect it exists also with the 600x. It's something that can be worked around, thankfully.

Thought you'd like to know,
Ms. Geek at Catseye Labs

[tdesmit]

I'm not sure where your limit came from, but my first guess is the Thinkpad BIOS not the latest. I just installed a 20GB drive in a straight 600, and I was running into the same trouble until I updated the BIOS. There are also HD software updates available on the IBM site as well, but the drive I had was already updated. I installed W2Kpro, and have all 20GB in one partition.

Tom DeSmit
600, looking for more ram and a faster processor!

[JHEM]

With the latest BIOS installed the 570 and 600 series both have no practical HD size limitation.

I have client's with 570s and 570Es that have 7K60s installed. My personal 570E had a 40GB HD in it.

I have 600s, 600Es and 600Xs here that have all had up to 80GB HDs in them at some point.

Sounds more like a BIOS than an IDE problem

Regards,

James

[wa8yxm]

I have a 600E, It came with a 20 Gig HD and I partitioned it as a signgle 20 Gig HD, running Win-98se, The ONLY problem I had was the every popular 3rd HD controller with the yellow circled exclamation point, and APM2APM.REG cleared that out just fine (it had no effect on operation since the phantom HD controller does not exist and thus is never accessed)

The drive died, an honest death due to old age (I wore it out) The new drive is 60 Gig, it formatted (Using Maxtor's Max-Blaster's format utility, one of the better formatters) like greased lightning, (Typical of Max Blaster, MY computer store's tech dept loves that program) and worked fine. I "Stole" 20 gig for a secure "Back Up Zone" and am left with a 40 Gig primary FAT 32 partition.

I do have the latest BIOS I don't have the latest problem though (Whtever it is) this thing is great... I do admit I work the hard off my drives though,,, After all. this box is 1/2 of my personal VCR system (Though I usually stuff video files on an external drive)

[MsGeek-CatseyeLabs]

I'm not sure where your limit came from, but my first guess is the Thinkpad BIOS not the latest. I just installed a 20GB drive in a straight 600, and I was running into the same trouble until I updated the BIOS. There are also HD software updates available on the IBM site as well, but the drive I had was already updated. I installed W2Kpro, and have all 20GB in one partition.

My 600e is updated to the newest BIOS flash...it came that way from an Off-Lease channel. Yet it still pulled the same crap. It's no tragedy to partition a drive. In fact, on W2K, which doesn't require the reformat/reinstall panacea as often as DOS-based Windows but still does require it every year or so give or take a few months, having your data on a separate partition from your OS is A Good Thing (tm).