Two relatively new 320GB WDC HDDs no longer booting

[cadillacmike68]

I bought 2 WDC 320 GB PATA (IDE) dfrives for my T30s and cloned my 100GB Hitachi onto them both. I used one as an everyday disk with the other as a backup. Both tested fine after the clone, but neither one shows the F11 restore option (even though i put the restore partition on each disk).

This past Tue (27 jul) while at the airport i turned on the T30 to read mail before boarding and all i got was a blinking cursor at the top left of the screen after i entered the system PW and HDD PW. OK, something happenned to this drive's bootstrap files, but what - no error messages, nothing but a cursor...

Oh well, when i get to my destination, i do it again a few times, just a cursor after the passwords. BIOS looks ok. Booting a Win98SE floppy and Fdisk, i can see the two partitions,. I reset the MBR with FDISK / MBR, same result, just a cursor..

I then put the backup drive in, and it boots fine, but the everyday drive in the Ultrabay tray is not even recognized. I put in the tray a smaller 40GB Win 98 drive (for my T22s) and it hot swapped and the system recognized it right away. I then put the 320 GB everyday drive back in the ultrabay, and it now shows up as well?!?

So i copied some files to the backup (currently booted) drive and then since it was 2 months i ran the recommended winblows updates and went to work. When i came back, it was done with the "updates" and wanted me to restart the computer, which i did and then:

I get the blinking cursor at the top with the backup drive as well?????

Fdisk doesn't help, it sees the drive, with the two partitions, but no luck on booting and still no error messages...

So for fun, i put the Win98 boot drive in the boot spot - i wanted to make sure that this was not a machine sysyem board or HDD controller issue - and that drive starts to boot win98 as soon as i enter the passwords!!!

I stopped it - don't want to mess up hat win98 drive which is set to a T22, but now am thoroughly confused as to why these two recently bought drives (bought at beginning of May) both decided to no longer boot...

i'm wondering if a winblows update messed up the boot drive - but I don't see how... It would also fail to explain what happened to the original drive.

Of coure I am not at home to get my original Hitachi 100 GB out (or the 80GB clone i also made!!) and won't be there until sun night, so i'm dead in the water unless someone knows what happened...

Thanks in advance for any help.

[rkawakami]

So i copied some files to the backup (currently booted) drive and then since it was 2 months i ran the recommended winblows updates and went to work. When i came back, it was done with the "updates" and wanted me to restart the computer, which i did and then:

Not sure from your description, but if you had both bootable clone drives in the system (i.e., everyday and backup) at the same time and attempted to boot, then that may explain why both drives are now MIA. My understanding is that you are not supposed to have two (virtually) identical boot drives in the system at the same time otherwise Windows gets thoroughly confused as to what drive is what and ends up hosing both. I learned this the hard way several years ago when cloning a desktop system. In my case I was using a Norton Ghost floppy and I told it to reboot when the copy was done, forgetting to disconnect the backup drive. Both drives essentially became unbootable but I didn't get a blinking cursor. They went as far as the Windows logon screen but there was no user icon to click on; just a blue background Welcome screen.

[cadillacmike68]

Ray, the two drives weren't virtually identical, they WERE identical, same size partitions and all.

If that's the case i can recover by re-cloning from my original hitachi - in 3 days

But that still does not explain what happened to my original drive.....

[cadillacmike68]

On my missing F11 option, i found this on Lenovo's site, someone else might find this useful:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-pri ... td-p/21821

Looks like its a special ThinkPad MBR that got wiped when i used W98 FDISK to initially get these two 320GBs to boot. That was a royal pain, what was it the bad or missing HAL file plus the MBR, etc... Maybe i'll use the other Arconis program (backup and recovery) and do a full clone of the hitachi instead of the disk director partition by partion copy.....

[cadillacmike68]

the hard drives still fiunctioned, so i eventually got my original 100GB out from the cabinet at home, copied all the new files from the 320, to a backup 250GB disk, recloned the 100GM onto both 320GBs again and they both work again. Then i copied from the 250GB onto the two 320s. what a time consumer...

Still with no explanation as to what caused the problem in the first place

[nom]

Hi,

if one of my thinkpads give me a blinking cursor, I always find this tool very helpful to restore the original IBM MBR:
http://support.lenovo.com/en_FI/downlo ... IGR-54483
Hth for the next time,

Nom

P.S. Keep in mind that the normal IDE bay is not designed for many swap cycles. You might get (or already have a loose pin on the IDE connector.