Longtime Thinkpad Owner with good general knowledge but limited troubleshooting and repair experience.

Thinkpad T60p Type 2613-CTO (about 5 yrs old)
XP Pro
3GB Ram
120MB HD
Machine has been lightly used 4 or 5 times a week for with standard internet applications.
Until now, I have had no problems whatsoever other than the battery no longer holding a charge.

Symptoms:
Had an inadvertent power loss (power cord was disconnected with a dead battery) resulting in immediate shutdown. Machine had been operating normally to that point and was regularly maintained with security updates and scans.

When restarting, the computer gets to the XP Windows screen and after attempting to start Windows the blue screen states:
UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME
Technical Information:
***STOP: 0x000000ED (0x8AFCF4F0, 0x00000006, 0x000000000, 0x00000000)

Multiple attempts yields same result. Cannot boot into Safe Mode but I can get into the BIOS settings (but don't know what most of them mean).
Removed the hard drive and attached it via USB to another PC. It took a few minutes to be recognized as drive on another computer (it was assigned a drive letter) but reported that that the drive had no media. I cannot see any information (folders or files) on the drive in Windows Explorer. There is no recovery media and I cannot get to the recovery partition on the drive and do not have any recovery disks.

My guess is that the hard drive failed and would like to confirm this opinion and see what is necessary to fix the problem.

Unless someone has a suggestion on how to revive the drive, I need to know how to get the recovery information necessary on a new hard drive. I have a new drive that I can use. I don't need to recover any data from the old drive.

The options I'm considering are getting a recovery disk for XP or upgrading to Win 7.

Assuming the hard drive is beyond repair, which option would you recommend and, in the case of a Win 7 upgrade, any hints with regard to minimizing any problems during the upgrade. In particular, will the 64-bit Win 7 work without any hassle or should I sick with the 32-bit version (64-bit is less expensive to buy).

Any help greatly appreciated.

Welcome to the forum!

It does seem that your hard drive has indeed failed.

A T60p will run W7 with no issues. You need a Core 2 Duo CPU to be able to utilize a 64-bit version.

Personally, I'd stick with a 32-bit one because of the 3GB usable RAM limit on T60/p generation.

Nothing wrong in sticking with XP, though - a set of recovery disks can be obtained for a reasonable amount of money in this forum's Marketplace. Likely way less than what W7 of any flavour will cost...

On another note, you should remove the dead battery from the system to prevent damage to the charging circuit until you obtain a new one.

Welcome to the forum!
There is nothing in the BIOS which will help the situation you describe. The most "comfortable" thing will be to install XP using Lenovo recovery disks. If you want adventure, then go the Windows 7 route ...

Read the PM (Private Message) that I sent you.

Problem Fixed !!!

On a whim I did a search for disk diagnostic utilities because I wanted to see if the hard disk might be repairable instead of replacing it. I found free diagnostic for IBM/Hitachi drives at:
http://www.hgst.com/support/downloads/

I made made a diagnostic boot CD from the iso download of the Drive Fitness Test software from that site and ran it according to the instructions. It found a bad sector on the drive and gave me the choice of erasing the bad sector or erasing the entire disk. I figured I had nothing to lose so I chose to fix the sector. After about an hour it I got a clean report that there were no longer any errors on the drive. I removed the CD and rebooted. To my amazement and delight, XP started !!!! and proceeded to reinstall the drive and drive controllers (Im guessing that information was on the bad sector that I erased). All of the hardware reinstalled and I rebooted again. Voila !! Everything is back to normal.

Many thanks to EOMtp for his help.

It's good to hear you fixed the bad sector. However, in my experience a harddrive which gets bad sectors will be nearing its end. You should make backups now while you still can. I think your harddrive will die withing 3 months.

To Backslashnl1: I assumed the sector was damaged by the power failure that probably prevented normal disk operations from closing properly, resulting in the drive being corrupted in an area that affected the boot process. I'm no expert, just seemed logical to me.

I appreciate your insight though and I will be backing it up immediately.