The pain continues with Seagate drives

I changed from the perpendicular drive to the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 ST980825A 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache. Same problem with the error message. However, Lenovo says this drive is supported and they have firmware for this drive. I have the firmware upgrade for this drive in an executable file. I'm waiting for my friend to bring me a floppy drive and disk to install the upgraded firmware. I tried using a USB key with no success. The version of the Seagate drive is 1.04 firmware. I have the latest bios from december 2006.

Wikipedia says this about the hard drives

Upgrade the drive firmware
IBM provides firmware upgrades (old, new) for some of its option drives to make them compatible with the affected ThinkPad models. The upgrades are available only for certain drive models, and may work only when the drive is sold as an IBM options (see below). Most drives do not have such upgrades, and some manufacturers have refused to adapt their firmware to the limitations of ThinkPad systems.

[edit]Drives that work out of the box
Seagate ST9120821A (120GB 5400RPM)
Seagate Momentus 7200.1 ST980825A (80GB 7200RPM) on T43 with BIOS 1.23
Seagate Momentus 7200.1 ST910021A (100GB 7200RPM)
Fujitsu MHV2100AH (100GB 5400RPM) on T43 with BIOS 1.23
Fujitsu MHV2120AH (120GB 5400RPM) on T43 with BIOS 1.27

 

This will be my last ThinkPad I ever buy. Lenovo has done a terrible job butchering the IBM brand. IBM has done some bad things as well with the T43 design.

 

So you were basically trying to upgrade the hard drive yourself by swapping it and it was not compatible?

 

No, I switched from a perpendicular 80GB Seagate to a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda drive that is compatable with my T43. That's a link to the official driver for my hard drive, which is supported by Lenovo. I had to pay $20 for a floppy drive to load the firmware. I have to manually load the firmware because my hard drive isn't sold directly from Lenovo and their automatic patch doesn't work on the same drive sold by 3rd party vendors.

Some may wonder why I would go to such great lengths to buy a Seagate drive. All I can say is 5 year warranty. My Toshiba drive lasted 16 months. Even 3 years is not long enough. And I saved $100 by not paying extorsion from Lenovo.

Who here has a floppy drive with a T42 or newer Thinkpad? Floppy's go back to the dark ages of DOS. Yes, XP still has DOS embedded inside somewhere. My driver disk is locked and loaded. I should be receiving my USB floppy drive tomorrow.

I am a golden god!

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-65058

 

I still have a USB floppy. I was re-installing Windows ME on someone's machine a few months back which and needed to make a boot floppy. You never know.

 

Hmm, thinkpads needs special firmwares for harddrives?
If thats true thats pathetic and a huge drawback with thinkpads.

However if the problem is seagate specific (and seagats fault) I wouldn't expect much from the lenovo support.
You can also connect the drive to a desktop computer and upgrade the firmware there, although you'd probably need an adapter for that (good to have one though since you never know when you might need some data on an unaccessible notebook).

 

The problem is not Seagate specific. Lenovo only supports 2 Seagate drives currently. This is according to their latest release of supported drivers. Below is a link to all supported Lenovo drives. It sounds like this is not just a T43 problem but a problem that affects many different thinkpad models. The below link only works with drives purchased through Lenovo. The link I used is specific to my Seagate model. I had to manually download the drivers to a a floppy, no ISO image support.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-62282

 

No go with the newest firmware. My last hope is bios 1.23
This is my first and last ThinkPad I will ever purchase. HP, here I come.

 

We need a faq for this. The BIOS errors from different hard drives is ONLY for T43 series computers. They used an IDE to SATA bridge internally, and it required custom firmware on drives, otherwise it would have problems. The T42 didnt have this problem, and the T60 certainly doesn't have this problem. If anything Lenovo saw what a stupid idea that was and quickly changed the design away from the custom interface during the design phase of the T60 after they bought out Lenovo. Or a more logical idea would be SATA drives became more mainstream, and it wasnt worth it to use IDE anymore.