HD PRoblem in laptop IBM

[venkaya]

Finally I was able to get the cdrom drive in the ibm thinkpad 390e to read data information (!!!) No idea how or why, it just started reading them again.

In the same laptop, I installed the win2000 pro and when i booted, there was a message telling me that the pc didnt find any OS. I can see my HD from the repair console of windows 2000 bootable cd, but i cant acces it in any other way. When i tried to format it, it would tell me that there were some unrecoverable errors. When i boot with a floppy, it wont find the c drive, it would allow me to c:\ but it is a RAMdrive, not the real one.

As far as I know, the pc hasn't been hit by anyone. I tooked out the HD and it has a rattling noise ( http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif )
ANY IDEA of how can I get it to work (IF it is possible)?

It says unrecoverable errors

[kenja]

Well, the rattling noise in a 2.5" hard drive is normal. The sticker on my new Hitachi even told me so; both it and my original IBM Travelstar sound like they contain loose BBs.

When you installed Windows 2000, did you make more than one primary partition? A boot floppy disk (with FDISK) that was made on a Win98 machine can recognize NTFS as non-DOS partitions (and remove them), but it turns into an endless loop if used on a hard drive with multiple primary partitions.

Have you tried booting into the Windows 2000 installation and deleting all partitions? The only time this didn't work for me was after using a Compaq restore CD that did something weird to the hard drive. I used the Norton Disk Doctor utility (on floppies) to repair the disk's organization.

[venkaya]

Thanks for writing back, this is a vwery weird problem for us. WE even tried to use partition magic but it didnt recognize the hard drive. The only thing that recognizes the HD is win 2000. Im going to try norton tonight, I hope it works,

If I need more help I will aprecciate if you could give me a hand,

Venkaya

[kenja]

Oh, I just remembered something about my 1400i (2621-460) Thinkpad: It contains a hidden 1.4 MB partition at the start of the drive. I'm guessing it supports the hibernation mode.

FDISK doesn't see the small partition; I was made aware of it by a warning message while using PowerQuest's Drive Image. The only way I could "see" the partition was by using Norton Disk Editor (which I set to "Read Only" mode http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif ). It contains a bunch of binary "stuff".

I've never had a problem with the hidden partition interfering with my Windows 2000 installations, though.