Intel X25-M Solid-State Drive (SSD) won't boot on T60

[Agotthelf Community Moderator]

Hello Jeff,

I would suggest simply try the other way round, despite it has gone very well on other machines.

Give it a try.

[XquizitFem]

  Jeff

   The solution to fix the problem is:  Custom Image =  Non-IBM/Lenovo preloaded O/S.
   
   If T6x/X6x/Z6x/R6x HDD not recognized when loading custom image.
   
    Set SATA to compatibility mode for custom image to "see" the drive.
   1. In BIOS, select config --> Serial ATA (SATA) -->    Select compatibility mode. Save and exit.
   
   2. Install Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver : MIGR-70477 before installing the O/S.
     http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-70477.html

   If this doesnt work the drive is not compatible to work in the T60 machines.
   Did you purchase the HDD from Lenovo?
   FYI some of IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads will only accept  IBM/Lenovo's manufacturer's parts.   
    
                      good luck  XquizitFem

[JeffS]

Thanks! I'll give this a try to see if it works. I understand what you're saying. It may not help me in the long run since I probably need to run the corporate laptop image, but at least it will let me know what the problem is, and maybe I can get a special image created that the drive will support. It's novel enough that the corporate IT guys might help me out.

I did not purchase the SSD from Lenovo- I think they use Samsung drives in the X300 series- so maybe next I'll try a Samsung drive if this doesn't work. The biggest problem is that most vendors don't allow returns on SSDs yet.

Regards,

Jeff

[danf100]

Jeff,

How goes the battle with the X25-M? I have one and have been using it in my T61 for a couple of months now and (overall) love it; boot times are incredible. I, too, have a "custom config" from my employer (previous maker of the ThinkPad), and what I did was to use an UltraBay HD caddy, put the X25-M in there, and then used Ghost to do a disk-to-disk image copy from the HD (in the "regular" HD bay in the T61) to the X25-M. In all, I've never had good luck using USB for making ghosted images. Once the ghost was done, I pull the drives out, swap them so that the SSD is now in the T61 itself and away we go...

Now, I ghost my machine frequently (up to this point before my SSD) between 2 or 3 HD's just to make sure I always had a recent image of it in case something happened to a HD, in which case I'd have a recent drive I could just swap in and then "catch-up" with my data. But, what I noticed is that the T's don't like booting to the newly ghosted HD on the first try; it would always hang during boot-up. What I do, then, is to boot into Safe Mode the first time I boot on the newly ghost imaged HD, allow Windows to "discover" the new HD, build the config for it, and then it will ask you to reboot with the new configs. From that point on, it will always boot fully into Windows normally.

Hope that helps. UltraBay HD caddies are pretty cheap (~$50) at NewEgg.com:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834995069&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle...

Thanks.

[JeffS]

Hey Dan- thanks- this is helpful. This T60 seems to clone well with mechanical drives so far. I'm using the USB enclosure and software that came with my 7200 RPM Hitachi drive ("Apricorn" brand or something like that). I did get our local IT manager to agree to try a fresh install onto the X-25M. Right now the X25-M is in my home PC, so hopefully tonight I'll clone it onto another drive (in case the T60 install fails and I want to put it back in the home PC) and then let the IT manager go at it tomorrow with it installed in the ThinkPad. I was encouraged because a user review on NewEgg said they had the X25-M working in their T60. I do note the T61 BIOS makes mention of an update that allows SSD booting, so maybe there's a difference between the models.

[JeffS · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone-

Thank you all for your suggestions. Without your ideas and encouragement I would have given up on this. It turns out that the problem was indeed with the cloning process. Originally I was cloning the existing drive onto the SSD using an external USB hard drive enclosure. This weekend, I put both the old mechanical drive and the new SSD into my desktop machine, hooked up via SATA cables, and cloned the mechanical drive onto the SSD using the same Apricorn software I was using previously. Success! The SSD now boots in my T60 and everything works perfectly. So, as other posters have said, the lesson here is that cloning via USB enclosure is not always successful.

I can now enthusiastically recommend the Intel X25-M for the Thinkpad T60.

Thanks again.

Message Edited by JeffS on 12-14-2008 06:34 AM

Message Edited by JeffS on 12-14-2008 06:35 AM

[rtp123]

Has your SSD continued to work fine?

Which cloning software did you use?  Easy to use..?

Did you simply unplug the T60 drive and plug in the SSD drive?

DId you wind up with the same partitions on the SSD drive as on the T60 hard drive?

Was it worth it?

Thx

Rich

[JeffS]

Rich,

I have used several different imaging programs. For SSDs, in my experience, Acronis True Image sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. The Apricorn software that came with my USB drive enclosure similarly works sometimes but not others. The only program that has worked 100% of the time is Drive Snapshot (www.drivesnapshot.de/en/). However, it's kind of expensive, and it has no way to compress a larger drive onto a smaller one, even if the larger drive's contents are much less than the capacity of the smaller target drive.

After I cloned the T60 mechanical drive onto the SSD (using SATA ports in my desktop PC), I just put the SSD into the ThinkPad, and I was done.

The Intel X25-M drive upgrade is by far the best improvement I've made to any PC in years. My ThinkPad is now nearly as responsive as my quad-core desktop machine for day-to-day office task usage. I've since put X25-Ms in all of the computers in our home because the mechanical-drive-based machines feel sluggish in comparison.

One word of caution: the X25-M did fail on me after a few months, and I lost all of my data. I had to restore from a backup. Intel exchanged the drive under warranty with no hassle, but this was unexpected loss since SSDs are supposed to be more reliable than mechanical drives. The replacement drive has been working well ever since, and the other 3 X25-Ms we own are also flawless, so this must have been a fluke.

In short, I highly recommend the Intel X25-M SSDs for any computer you own, and I was saying that at twice their current price.