incompatible HD for T41

[synmag]

Hi All,

I have an old T41 whose HD gave up the ghost recently.  I ordered a replacement Samsung HM160HC 160GB IDE drive which when I install doesn't work and the laptop won't even go into bios.  I thought maybe my cmos battery died at the same time but tried putting the dead drive back in and I was able to go into bios.  

Some search revealed that some HDs were not compatible with this model and the samsung was listed as not working even with firmware update with some models.  It didn't even occur to me that not all HDs are compatible with this laptop.  

According to this page there are very limited number of option drives listed:

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail.page?LegacyDocID=MIGR-50075

Is this really the complete list?  I'm going to see if any of them are still available.

[ajkula66 Guru]

Welcome to the forum!

There are NO compatibility issues on T41 machines when it comes to hard drives.

I've used (and still do) that same HD make and model in anything from T40p through T43p.

You might have a bad drive, or a bent pin, check for that.

Try booting with that Samsung in another machine and report back.

[synmag]

I was getting the "PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, Check Cable" error message with the new drive.  Further research revealed that turning off booting from the network helped others.   I put the old drive back to be able to go in BIOS to turn off network boot and once I put the new drive in and booted off a windows install cd it recognized the drive.  After installing the OS I was able to go into the BIOS again.  Interesting.  Thanks for your response through.

[Mornsgrans · Accepted solution]

This was caused by "wrong attaching" the HDD:

The hard drive must be inserted vertically because the pins of the HDD can be settled in to the wrong socket line if horizontally attached. In that case the HDD gets no power an data signals.

Also important:

The HDD-cage must be fixed with all four screws.

[synmag]

I always dropped the drive in from above as it seemed the most natural way to do it.  I'm 99% sure the pins went in the correct slots as it went in smoothly and I know how it feels when they don't as I have bent a pin on a CF card reader before.

The ironic part is that when I put the drive in the second time, still sceptical that it would work, I only put the top two screws in to avoid having to remove more if it still didn't work.  I was just about to put the missing screws in when I saw your message.   

Thanks again.