Thinkpad T43 Hard Drive Issue

I recently picked up a T43 from ebay. It came with no hard drive so I ordered a Seagate 160GB Momentus. I have not been able to get the machine to see the hard drive, no matter what I try. When I plug the hard drive in to my USB adapter and hook it to my desktop, the drive works fine.

Is the IDE port on the T43 most likely dead? I've tried setting the hard drive jumper to master, slave,CS, and nothing makes a difference. I'm considering ordering a PATA ultrabay adapter to see if the drive will work in the ultrabay, seeing as the DVD drive functions just fine. If I could relocate the drive there and then install windows from USB, at least I'd have a running machine.

My BIOS version is 1.05, which I believe is fairly old. But the new BIOS flash utility I downloaded is meant to be run in Windows. Kind of hard to do if your machine won't even see the hard drive, much less let you install windows. And I'm not even sure if updating the BIOS would make a difference.

Ideas on this one?

 

Is the drive correctly inserted, as in: no jumpers, face down, secured in its caddy with all four screws and pushed in all the way with the HDD cover?

 

No jumpers, label face down, in caddy, with two screws, and the cover in place.

No screws came with the laptop so I had to find a couple that were small enough to mount flush so that the drive/caddy could slide in OK.

 

I'd get the four screws in. Trust me on that one. The tolerances that can result in a drive getting recognized are pretty amazing on these machines.

You're not getting a "0200" error on boot, are you?

 

I'd hate to think of the trouble in trying to track down 4 official screws for that caddy. And while you may be right, I've had the machine apart and can't see any reason, physical or electrical, why those screws would matter.

But I'd try it if I could find them--I'm just sure that it will be a waste of time as I couldn't even find a place to get the factory restore discs for my X220, and it's a much newer machine.

I'll see if I can get the hard drive to work in the ultrabay adapter. If not, I'll throw in my cards and send the machine to the scrapper.

 

OK, so against my better cynicism, I decided to rummage through my screw box and see if I could find two more tiny screws. I put 4 screws in the caddy and @POOF@, 2010 error. The computer sees the drive now.

I would really like to know how that made a difference.

But thanks, it booted once and worked. Hopefully it will continue to do so.

 

There is a modded BIOS that eliminates the "2010 error" along with the wireless whitelist. It has to be run from within Windows, though.

If you're planning on toying with older ThinkPads such as this one, I'd strongly suggest joining Bill Morrow's ThinkPad Forum:

forum.thinkpads.com • Index page

Good luck.

 

I found the modded BIOS and got it flashed successfully. 2010 error gone. Also got XP and Xubuntu installed. Everything seems to be running well.

I like these old machines, but not sure I want to keep messing with them simply because of how difficult/expensive it can be to find old parts. I think I got lucky with having some screws that would work. It probably would have went to the scrap otherwise because I wouldn't have paid someone on ebay $30 for 4 screws.

 

They are very inexpensive to operate, and there's a ton of stuff for them that you can get for price of shipping on TPF...