CF-51: mSATA to IDE adapter recognized by BIOS, but won't boot

I've got an old CF-51 at work that I've been doing upgrades to as a hobby project.

I already successfully did a CPU upgrade ($5.50 on eBay for an extra 35% speed ain't bad), and since the hard drive is going I figured I'd try for an SSD upgrade on the cheap.

Rather than getting an IDE SSD, I went with a good SanDisk mSATA SSD paired with a well-rated mSATA to IDE adapter. If I'd realized SATA to IDE 5.25" caddies were available so cheap, I'd probably have gone with one of those to start, but oh well.

Anyway, the IDE adapter works fine connected to one of those cheap USB-IDE dongles, and I was able to clone Windows to it with no errors. It won't quite boot off the USB dongle, but it gets partway in at least, which is what I'd expect.

Swapping it into the internal drive caddy (prior to attempting to boot from USB, so that's not the problem), however, ends up stuck on a black screen immediately after POST. The BIOS does see and recognize the drive, but it won't boot, or even try to. If I boot from a live Clonezilla drive with the drive in the HDD caddy, Clonezilla throws a bunch of DMA errors at start, so there's definitely something going wonky with it attached to the caddy. No such errors with it on a USB dongle.

The drive is 128GB, so LBA48 can't be the problem, although I think this machine is okay with that anyway.

Any suggestions before I give up? It kind of seems like the SATA-IDE adapter is not offering a compatible DMA mode (while my cheapie USB dongle does), but there's no way I'm aware of to switch it on either the adapter or BIOS.

 

Welcome to the Panasonic Toughbook forum
Do you have pictures/model number of the adapter you are using. Only a couple of these adapters work in the Toughbook. The cheap ones they sell on ebay are crap and give a lot of problems

 

Aleratec; here's an Amazon page with detailed photos:

http://www.amazon.com/Aleratec-mSAT...=1447096567&sr=8-3&keywords=ide+adapter+msata

Had a bad feeling something like that might be the case.

 

Well the best way to put it is...the bios does not understand what you are using or how to handle it. This happens when you try to install something new in something old. Now if there was a bios update for the 51 maybe but there is not. I did the cpu upgrade too but I went with the 7200 rpm hdd and it worked great which I gave to my granddaughter and so loves it. It's just as fast as my CF-52.

 

I shouldn't be surprised, but I guess I was expecting more consistent compatibility from a Core-series computer released in 2006, when even ATA-7/UDMA6 had been out for a couple of years. Maybe Panasonic didn't bother to include ATA-7 support in the BIOS since they were expecting proprietary drives, and the adapter I got won't automatically fall back to ATA-6 or lower (I remember owning a Samsung drive way back in the day that defaulted to 133 speeds and needed to have jumpers set to manually force 66; took me quite a while to figure that out).

 

Where are you located?
I have 2 or 3 of those cheap ide to sata adapters left over from when I had CF51's.

 

Northern California. Out of curiosity, mSATA to IDE, or full-sized SATA to IDE? I chose mSATA because it'd fit comfortably in the same amount of space, despite the extra cost.

 

Didn't you send me one of those? I used that adapter that was posted here that worked great with a 2.5" sata SSD. Can't remember the brand but the drive was backwards and the sata connection ran under the drive with a long cable to the ide hookup. Some guy was advertising them here or the other place.

 

I was referring to the older low cost ones that I still have. I will send them for free if someone wants to try them.

This is the newer $30 version....... http://www.ebay.com/itm/IDE-to-SATA...788738?hash=item19fd1e1202:g:YbIAAOSwPhdVA1Dm

 

That works great,I sold a CF-51 with a T7600 and a 128 SSD. Now I remember,I ordered a handful of the cheap ones for Morgan and one wouldn't work. He returned it and the rest of them went into CF-29's. Or something like that.

 

I had one of them too and this was one of the best ones on the Web right now

 

I'd be happy to pay shipping (+) if you'd be willing to throw one at a random guy who just started posting.

 

click on his picture then click '' Start a Conversation ''

 

I found a setup that works with certain 1.8" SSDs here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ems-such-as-cf-51.702624/page-13#post-9913849

mSata drives with a specific adapter that work in the Thinkpad that uses the same chip set
are also discussed at the end. The adapters are fussy about the chipset used in the SSD.
I'm now typing on a CF-51 with the SSD I described in that thread.

 

See post #114 in that thread where someone got an mSATA to work, here is a quote:
"I'm using the Minerva ST663FD9 mSATA adapter recommended by ajkula66 on the previous page. Just ordered another from eBay seller "storage-adapter" who said it is backordered from Taiwan and will take a few days.
My CF-51RCVDFBM has BIOS V3.50L13 and EC V3.50L12

ETA: Your 51Q is a Mk-3 high performance with BIOS V3.0xxx, T2500 cpu and has the higher resolution 1600x1200 display. My 51R is a Mk-3 lower performance that originally came with a T2300 @ 1.66 GHz. Don't know if there is any difference in drive controllers tho."

The other guy could not get it to work and thought it was a BIOS issue, but I've gotten a MK-3 with the older BIOS to work with a 1.8" SSD so I don't think that is the issue.