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T23 won't recognize HDD

T20-T23 Series and T30. NOT for T25-Retro.
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cadillacmike68
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T23 won't recognize HDD

#1 Post by cadillacmike68 » Tue Dec 06, 2011 3:01 pm

It figures this would happen on my one T23 that has SXGA+, 1.2GHz & WiFi.

This T23 refuses to recognize 4 out of 5 HDDs that i put in it. I put 1 in booted the recovery CD went through the warningd and got an error "correct disk not found" I was thinking did it not like the recovery CD? Three tries later with the same HDD I thought t might be an HDD problem, so i booted to BIOS ans while there are no diags in the BIOS, you can tell if it sees the HDD i the password screen. It will shoew paswoed options for the 1st and 2nd HDDs if they are present.

Well, it showed no HDDs to install or remoce a password ?!?!?! I pulled the HDD and put it in a T30 - it shows up fine on the T30. Only 1 of 4 HDDs registered wit the T30. These are all old hitachi / IBM HDDs with FRUs on them. They all had T22 FAT32 images on them except 1 that 1 re-low level formatted and put a blank NTFS partition (that was the one that showed up in the T23). so i wiped one out on the T32, and put a blank NTFS on that HDD. But when i put it back in the T23. It still won't recognize it.

Did the T23 have some kind of whitelist on HDDs, or do i have one that is about to kick the proverbial bucket due to a southbridge faulire???

Finally did get a recovery to go through, on the 1 HDD that it would recognize. First time it hung up on the "insert recovery CD # 2 prompt. That required a complere do-over. The second time it took a hiatus on converting from FAT32 to NTFS, but i just re-booted it and it picked up fine. The original Actiontec WIFI SEEMS to work - had to run off to work this morning, but will verify later (and test the spare ActionTec that i have), but I'm concerned that this T23 might be about ready to need a reflow of the Southbridge chip solder.

What say you experts???
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jronald
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Re: T23 won't recognize HDD

#2 Post by jronald » Tue Dec 06, 2011 4:46 pm

No white list that I am aware of. The T23 can mis-align the installing HDD sometimes. On at least one of my machines I ALWAYS had to take the palm rest off, to get the pins low enough to engage.

Just a thought
Ron
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rkawakami
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Re: T23 won't recognize HDD

#3 Post by rkawakami » Wed Dec 07, 2011 12:38 am

I've had upwards of 60 T23 systems through my hands in these last several years. None, as far as I can remember, have had a problem seeing a hard drive that would also work in another system.

My guess is that Ron could be on the right track. However, if you don't use a caddy, then it's easy to mis-align the drive when it's slid into the bay. Also, you may want to pull the Actiontec wireless card when trying out different hard drives as I've seen defective cards really do strange things to a system (non-boot, what looks like a power problem, hangs in the middle of Windows install).
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cadillacmike68
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Re: T23 won't recognize HDD

#4 Post by cadillacmike68 » Wed Dec 07, 2011 9:59 am

Thanks both.

I bought caddies for all my drives. saves a lot of time when switching around.

I WAS using the outer cover as well, but felt that it might be getting in the way, so i'm just sliding the drives in and none of them seem to be hanging up on the IDE connector. They do slide in very easily. I wonder if the T23s connector is worn or loose.

Certainly none of the pins are bent on any of the HDDs and i have ultrabay'd the drives that the T23 doesn't like in a T30 and the T30 sees them fine both before and after. I also wiped and re-partitioned one of the drives (a 32GB) in a T30, put a blank NTFS partition on it and the T23 STILL doesn't want to see it.

What I have not done is put one of the "rejected" HDDs in the ultrabay. I'll do that, but that will only verify that the other cnannel recognizes the drive. However if these are all rejected in the ultrabay, it might de some strange thing with these HDDs but that would only make me more confused :?

Kind of stumped here. I have a half dozen more 30-40GB HDDs to try out, But this is a first for me, a machine rejecting SOME drives. :(

Went shooting last nite so i did not get around th final verification of the actiontec. But i'll take it out to see if it has any effect.
600 600X
760LD FUBARd
T21 2647 T22 2647 1@ 1GHz SXGA+ 4 more; T23 2647 1@ 1.2GHz SXGA+ 3 more
T30 2366-88U 2GHz; 2366-83U 1.8G; 5@ 2366-LU0/66U; 2367-KU6 FUBARd
T41 T42 T43
T60 T61 8897 2.4GHz SXGA+; 8898 2.4Ghz; 6463 2@ WSXGA+; 7658 2.5GHz; T61p; 6 more T61s
T500 2
T530 W530

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