Dear Guru's,

Help! I have a T30 2366 and I wish to use a WD3200BEVE (This is the 320GB version) HDD which I want to set up as a dual boot with DOS on 'C' and normally XP on 'E'. I have carried this out many times on the 80Gb Hitachi however this is the first time on the 320Gb WD.
The drive is not recognised after loading an operating system. If the clean, new HDD is installed it can load the operating system but then at reboot it can not be found.
I have tried:
Single partition
Multiple partitions
Limiting partitions to 80gb
Various formats.
Unfortunatly I no longer have an 80Gb HDD to take a clone from so must build form scratch.

Your help would be appreciated.

I've had all kinds of problems with that particular drive getting it set up in the past. Not sure why, but this is what worked for me. Attach the drive to the laptop via a USB enclosure or USB/SATA adapter cable. Boot up activekilldisk and write all zero's to the drive. Then attach the drive to a working windows laptop or desktop. Initialize the drive in disk management, then create a fat32 partition, then format it. Now make it a bootable DOS disk by putting the DOS system on the drive. Now try to boot in the original machine.

The old DOS (like 6.22) used FAT16, which has a partition size limit of 2GB.
If you use FDISK, it will ask if you want support for large disks, and then you could format in FAT32.
Less restrictions there.

I'm using DOS 7.1 and it supports FAT32 however I have tried FAT16 2Gb and DOS 6.1. The issue is not so much the DOS install which once you address the issue raised by Harryc installs and can be seen - well at least briefly until the XP pro install is carried out. I have tried a prepartitioned/format using an external enclosure and disc management tool to create the partitions (either FAT16/32 and NTFS) and limited size to 80Gb on the NTFS but to no avail. Once XP installs either to the created NTFS partiton or creates one to install the machine does not recognise the drive again at all.

I confess to being stumped with this. I have built a number of configurations like this for both A31p, R's, T30's & Panasonic Toughbooks CF-18/19 and never encountered an issue like this.

Until recently I had a 2GB FAT16 partition (not bootable, but accessible in a Windows DOS/CMD box) somewhere in the middle of the hard disk.
I needed and used that to compile Cobol programs. Since I've stopped developing those, I also wiped the partition.

From what I remember, in the W98 days and later with W2K, you would format the HD in FAT32, install MS-DOS 6.22 or PC-DOS 7.01, and then install Windows in the same partition.
At bootup you could choose between DOS and Windows.

See also this: http://www.computing.net/answers/window ... 44147.html

The question is not so much 'how to do it' as I have succesfully built a number of dual boot drives more why won't it work on the T30.
I just tried loading XP on it's own and the same issues occoured. Used the T30 recovery discs and again the same issue.
It was my understanding that the Max HDD for the T30 was 320Gb. I am mistaken?

As such, there is no MAX size of hard disks for a T30.
As long as they physically fit, you can put in any size PATA disk in the main bay.
Only the market availability limits it to 320GB, as nobody makes a larger HD in 2.5" PATA

My suggestion would be:
reformat and repartition the HD again.
Make the DOS partition (C:) big enough to hold a subdirectory i386, into which all the files from another XPP-i386 directory are copied.
Then boot into DOS and run Windows install (winnt.exe) from the i386 partition. Use the COA key on the bottom of the laptop.
Then install dotnetfx and SystemUpdate to get all the T30 drivers. You'll be missing out on the IBM-versions of CD/DVD writing/playing SW, but who cares? Better ones are available for free.

Reason you have the current problems is the weird way IBM/Lenovo use R&R. Skip that crap, and you'll be fine.

RBS, are you referring to the wonderful Lenovo Rescue & Recovery, that sucked up every available byte on my wife's T61?? Yeah i had to kill that and deleted the R&R from her system.

I didn't think they had that (R&R) on the T30s though. I have two of the WD 320GB PATA (EIDE) drives, but i haven't tried to make them a dual boot DOS / WXP (because i use my T22 for DOS apps (it has W98 on it and a 60GB Hitachi).

BlackPearl, are you still DITW on this? Do you have any HDD with XP on it?? Have you tried using the T-30 series ultrabay 2nd HDD adapter? these plug the drive into your primary IDE controller, and makes disk ops much more straightforward. There is some windows XP routine that detects the taft that the drive is externally connected and flags the drive's MBR as not bootable. that causes issues afterwards.

If you are going to work from a single HDD, i guess your only option is to get WXP installed - presumably from an IBM recovery CD. Then i would recommend acronis disk director - NOT their rescue and recovery. ADD is kind like a modern Partition Magic, with the distinction that it works in WXP, unlike the last version of PowerQuest PM (8.0 - which i gave up on for winblows XP) PM8 still works great on my T20 series with W98 so i keep it.

Anyway, with ADD you can resize and move your WXP partition to leave a gap of any desired size at the front of the HDD and then you can floppy boot DOS and put that on the free space. You will then need to fix the problem that WXP MIGHT have in that now it sees itself on D - unless you also install a boot manager to HIDE the DOS partition on boot time so WXP sees itself as drive C. You'll still have to clear the WXP crap they put in the end of the MBR by booting a w98 startup diak and 'reloading' the MBR via FDISK. Winblows Bootfix will not clear the MBR fully. That or a boot manager look like the best COA. Note this is NOT Winblows 'dual boot" which is an abotrrtion in any event. IBM OS/2 Boot Manager might do what you need, I just don't know where to DL it. On my own machine i have some links to the details on multi-booting with WXP. when i get that back on the net, i'll post them.

Thanks to all who have offered help with this issue.
I must apologise for the long absence however I have been working on the problem again.

RBS
I must report the same issue as before at boot following XP install.

CM68
Unfortunately as above.

All suggestions welcome as it is becoming pressing. To outline why it important, over the years 2 different tools have been developed. The first in DOS and the second as NTFS compatible. To carry out some advanced functions we need to boot into DOS, use the tool to extract certain data then reboot into XP and read the data from the DOS partition into the later tool. Edit the data, create a file and transfer back to the DOS partition. Reboot into DOS and burn the new file into the Eeprom. Yes I now it's a long winded process but it's what we have to work with. Any help appreciated - If you can build the dual boot image and can prove it. I buy it.
Thanks