T43p boots but login screen is garbled when I swap IDE HD.

[sircorey]

I have a T43p which I ordered online; came with a Samsung 160GB HD (PATA).
I have another T43 which had a 40GB IDE HD with my old software I don't have the Office 2007 CD so I want to use this 40GB IDE Drive drive instead of the 160GB PATA. I think IDE=PATA but not sure.

Anyways when I boot up the Laptop with the 160GB HD everything works fine
When I boot up the Laptop with the Hitachi stock 40GB HD, I get the IBM ThinkPad boot screen and the XP Screen with the scrolling blue bars and as soon as it loads the login screen displays the mouse pointer with a garbled blue square behind it like the Login screen but blank. Then I get a blue windows error screen with some Error message that I can't read because the text is scrambled as well.

Sometimes works sometimes don't, it's intermittent; don't know why. I think it's a hardware acceleration problem or the 60hz/1400x1050 display settings but the laptop came configured with that and works fine everytime with the HD it came shipped with.

I've always used 1024x768 with my old t43 no problems with my old HD, I installed the ATI FireGL 3200 drivers on the 40GB and everything worked fine. When the laptop works on occasion it says Windows has recovered from serious error and said you have sever error with video device, advises to set Hardware Acceleration to None and clear Enable Write Combining box

Safe Mode works everytime though.
Running XP SP3, Full Acceleration, Enable Write Combining Checked doesn't work.
What display settings, Hardware Acceleration,Refresh Rate options do you advise?
Is this even the issue? Any clues?

Thanks,

Corey

[Harryc]

Intermittent problems 'usually' spell hardware problems. Try running the manufacturers diagnostic program on the old hard drive. If it's an old IBM drive it's probably an Hitachi, so you'd want to run their drive fitness test.
http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/