T41 SSD woes

I bought a 32Gb for my T41 but after cloning the standard 2 partition 32ish Gb drive to it, no boot up.

The post screen hangs when starting up the HD protection utility, which I presumed only ran within Win...

I also can't boot from a h/d adapter in the slim accessory bay, only from a CD drive in this bay...

Any suggestions?

 

Yes, mail me the drive immediately : )

Seriously, I doubt the HD protection utility would be necessary, nor compatible. It might be trying to shut of the non-existent motor, powering down the SSDs interface. From what I have read, SSDs have their own issues such as wear leveling and such, and those are handled by the SSD itself.

I'm assuming that the T41s didn't support the AHCI that would normally have to be disabled in BIOS that would allow the machine to boot.

I suspect your cloning operation; perhaps the utility isn't making the drive bootable for some reason. Before I gave up, I would also installing a fresh OS installation. Of you don't have a full copy of windows, you could try your restore disks, a with Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu, or an older copy of windows, such as 2000.

When you get it working, you might want to add enough RAM so the machine doesn't need to use the SSD for a swap, unless you are using it for a Photoshop swap disks.

 

Both drives are P-ATA, so AHCI isn't the issue. I should be able to boot off the cloned SSD via USB however, and can't do that either.

If other people have had success with SSDs in this notebook series, I guess I could spend the extra $ for a new OS serial number.

 

Well, I've done a clean install of XP SP2, and still see the exact same following on boot-

IBM Hard Drive Active Protection sensor diagnostics start (seen only in diagnostics boot mode- this is where I'm guessing all my problems are coming from)
Intel Boot Agent GE v1.2.17
Preboot eXecution Environment (Network Boot Protocol- which I can't get rid of)
Intel Boot Agent PXE Base Code (BA1217BC)
Initiating and establishing link
PXE-E61 : Media test falure, check cable
PXE-M0F : Exiting Intel Boot Agent
Operating System not found

Any suggestions would be very welcome...

 

Anyone? Surely I'm not the first person to try and boot from a SSD in a T series!?

 

Is there anything in bios that has to do with the active protection sensor? If so you may be able to disable it. I believe you can disable the network boot in bios also.

 

No, it won't let me do either, and I have the latest BIOS.

I guess I'm stuffed then. Lenovo cared so much for us, they didn't give us the option (at least on this model) to not use their wonderful hardware based h/d protection system...

ebay, here I come.

 

Update- on another forum someone answered my thread with extremely similar (exact same?) results adding a 64Gb drive. He finally discovered his issues were due to MBR errors that kept occuring when loading the OS, and fixed them with a freeware MBR tool.

I read his post the evening after posting my drive back to supplier, so I sadly didn't get a chance to test it out on my system.

I'm still in search of a SSD for my T41. (Maybe the IDE Memoright ?) Otherwise I'll buy a Dell...

I wish there were more people who'd put SSD's into the T series. Finding them seems like winning lotto.

 

If MBR errors are the problem after a clean install, then the problem is that XP doesn't know how to install and boot the SSD drive. It is using a default geometry for a normal disk drive, which translates into nonsense in the SSD. I don't know if this happens with all SSD and XP, or just some models. The solution would be a pre-install driver from the SSD manufacturer loaded at the beginning of the XP install process.

 

The poster I refered to above was using a T42, and we both experienced the same issues regardless of whether we did clean XP installs, or cloned existing XP boot drives..?

If I could be really sure I'd nailed the problem I'd buy another SSD. It seems a shame to replace this neat little guy with it's T series compatibility. (I hate how Dell refuse to sell their modular drive caddies seperately, and prefer T notebooks for this reason alone.)

 

You could clean-install XP a hundred times and it still won't work if you don't have the correct driver pre-loaded for the SSD...

 

It would be nice if they provided drivers, but aren't all of these SSD producers claiming their SSD's are simply plug & play? Mine was the Samsung. I'm currently looking at the more $$ ones from DV Nation, but none come with drivers as far as I'm aware.

 

It has nothing to do with drivers not supplied by the ssd manufacturer, but rather, the method of AHCI/SATA/PATA-IDE utilization by the manufacturer....especially Sony.

I have had several ssds in my system without a problem.