Re: [Thinkpad] [T43p] largest capacity HDD recognized *FOLLOW-UP*

Hello,

I just wanted to conclude my earlier message thread from February in which
I asked about the largest hard disk drive available for the ThinkPad T43p
series (see original post in the list archives at
<http://stderr.org/pipermail/thinkpad/2006-February/020740.html>).

After reading though all of the replies I decided to hold off on upgrading
due to the issues reported with the SATA to PATA bridge in the T43-series
until the way I was using my ThinkPad made it a necessity (an archive for
files). This also allowed the prices to come down slightly on hard disk
drives, too.

I finally decided on an 100GB 7200 RPM Hitachi Travelstar hard disk drive
(7K100 series, model HTS721010G9AT00), which I purchased for $170.00USD
(not including S&H and tax) from NewEgg. This model is OEM and has a
three-year warranty, I believe.

After receiving the hard disk drive, I made sure I had the latest BIOS and
EFI in my T43p (2668-H7U), installed the hard disk drive, and promptly got
some short beeps and an "ERROR 2010" message, which gave me an unusually-
long (for IBM) message warning me the currently-installed hard disk drive
had not been tested for use in this model of ThinkPad, that I could press
a key to continue, and that I could go into the BIOS to bypass the message.

Going into the BIOS, I "disabled" the warning prompt, which actually does
not disable it, but instead causes it to display (and sound) the warning
message (complete with beeps) and then boot as normal after several seconds.

Time to do some research. A bit of searching came across a lengthy
message thread on Bill Morrow's ThinkPads.Com forum at
<http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=20944> explaining how to update
various hard disk drives' firmware so a T43-series ThinkPad would be able to
boot from them without reporting any errors. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Download a floppy diskette image with firmware for various drives from
     <http://rapidshare.de/files/13537522/5K7K100.rar.html>.

2. Boot the ThinkPad from a floppy diskette and run the following
     commands:

     hfui15.exe oa51a mczia51a.bdr /f mpca51ab.tbl
       and press "U" to begin the update, it will fail the first time

     hfui15.exe ia51a mczi151a.bdr /f mpca51ab.tbl
       and press "U" to begin the update, and it will pass

3. Power down.

When I reapplied power to the system, the error message no longer appeared.
Then I went ahead and partitioned and formatted the hard disk drive.

After doing this with my laptop, a coworker with a T43 (series unknown) and
an 80GB 7200 RPM Hitachi Travelstar (series 7K100, model HTS721080G9AT00)
had the same problem. His HDD came in a retail package from Apricorn. Here
are the commands we used to upgrade the firmware on the hard disk in his T43:

   hfui15.exe oa51a mc4ia51a.bdr /f mpca51ab.tbl
     and
   hfui15.exe ia51a mc4ia51a.bdr /f mpca51ab.tbl

The behavior was the same as with my ThinkPad, where it failed the first
time the firmware update was run, and passed on the second.

If anyone else reading the message thread on the ThinkPads.Com forum at
<http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=20944> before attempting any
of the above. As always, caveat emptor when performing warranty-voiding
operations such as these.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

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Received on Tue May 2 02:55:00 2006