T43 intermittantly sees HDD.

[tgrevers]

Greetings-

I'm working on a T43 that is giving me some fits. It will intermittantly see the HDD. If I press down on the right side of the wrist pad, it's more likely to recognize the drive at boot time. I thought it might be a bad drive, so I installed a new drive, but that wasn't the problem. It's clear to me that it's related to the storage interface to the system board. Has anyone else seen this problem? If so, how did you address this?

Thanks,

-Ted

[tgrevers]

I just found the other thread discussing this problem. It sounds to me like this is more of a system board problem than anything else, where the socket attaches to the system board. As this machine has used the original HDD for many years, and the original HDD shows now physical faults or failures, I anticipate that this will require system board repair work at this point.

[ajkula66]

You might be looking at a loose SouthBridge chip, which is a more common issue on these machines than a bad IDE connector.

Have you noticed weird behaviour of USB ports, networks, keyboard, audio?

[tgrevers]

The only other strange behavior was that the machine would lock up while typing - which emulated the GPU problem you'd see on the earlier T4x series machines. Would the southbridge problem be something that pressing down on the palm wrest would temporarily fix?

[ajkula66]

Yes.

The keyboard issue is one of the dead giveaways for the loose SouthBridge...the darn chip affects just way too many things on these machines.

Good luck.

[RealBlackStuff]

Yep, Southbridge.
Check The Board Room website in my signature.

[Thedaddy]

I'm rather new to posting though have been lurking for awhile. Mostly because you folks are light years advanced from me!
But to the topic at hand: I have a T43 with the same problem. It is not the Southbridge. Initially I was getting HDD errors. I pushed down in the area of the HDD, an hola, it worked. I took off the mouse cover for a closer inspection, and here is what I get: the machine works fine if I manually push on the inbound inner corner of the HDD (Cmos side). As soon as I let off. it freezes. Push again, it works. Hold it down, it works.
I tried the southbridge and no change. Nope, it is something in the MB right where the HDD connects to the MB. I switched out a known good HDD and I get the same thing. Looking at a T42 MB in my hand, which I hope is similar, where the HDD "plugs" in, it appears it is two pieces on the MB side, the top piece sliding down on two pins to the MB. This piece is actually where the HDD goes in and there is a slight gap between this and the socket in the MB. It appears to be made that way as a natural cushion if you will, because I can see a slight gap open and close as I push. If these two pieces come apart-- which I am hesitant to try to force, perhaps dirt or who knows what is causing intermittent connection issues with the HDD?

[poshgeordie]

Welcome to the forums Thedaddy

It's possible the HDD header has a bad solder joint and if that's the case it's easy enough to resolder (compared with the SB!).
However it's worth using an thin insulated stick, e.g. handle end of a toothbrush. to press around the SB chip edges and you may find that pressing on one corner or along one side of the chip causes the HDD to work again.

I'm not saying you're wrong but having repaired probably hundreds of these I've never had to solder an HDD header.

[Thedaddy]

Thank you for your kind words of welcome, poshgeordie.
I will take your advice and try that tonite. I defer to your experience, perhaps pushing down manually on the corner of the HDD is moving the Southbridge to its sweet spot, and I am not seeing that. The only reason I suspected the HDD was an error code that the system did not recognize the HDD, 2010? may have been the error code. When I pushed down on the HDD and rebooted to last known good config, it loaded XP just fine. I also noted the t43 RAM is different from the T42 RAM, as I wanted to add a board on the bottom side and the spare T42 RAM I had wouldn't go into the slot. lol.
I am learning...I am learning. You folks are geniuses on the Thinkpads, and thankfully this forum is here for us diehard Thinkpad users. I have used nothing else for many years, one breaks and I upgrade. I have a broken T21 that I will eventually get to. I was able to repair and recover my R51 thanks to the advice I read here.