Anilrgowda

Question: My wife has an IBM X22 - we need to rebuild the XP OS on it. I've taken the defunct 20GB drive out so I can experiment: that one is failing so I need to replace it fast.

The 80GB disk I want to put into it (a 5400rpm Fujitsu MHT2080AT) is about 1 year old. It worked fine in my Thinkpad X30 before I replaced it with a faster drive.

I'm using system restore CDs from IBM. I've now repeated the process 4 times, trying different things, including sizing the disk to < 64GB.

After the install process, the files are all there - I can see them when I mount the disk over firewire from my X30, or when I boot from dos on this X20. The problem is that it does not boot The machine just hangs, showing a flashing cursor.

I reformatted and performed an FDISK /MBR on this 80GB drive, ensured I had activated it and that it showed as the only disk in fdisk. If my memory serves it formatted as an NTFS partition.

The only weird thing I did was to get over the fact that the X22 does not have a floppy disk was to make a bootable USB key using http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/fi...oad/20306.html
; I could not use Bootdisk.Com - Free NTFS Boot disk, Boot Disk, Windows boot disk, XP Bootdisk, DOS Bootdisk - http://bootdisk.com/txtfiles/xpquick.txt - as these were set up for people using a floppy, rather than USB, and the utilities don't provide a way to push to a different place. (I wish those sites were a wiki so I could interject my thoughts)

I've several times ensured that fdisk shows nothing. I also tried maxllf and http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/...-wipe-zap.html to get it to an initial state.

IBM's Installation instructions for Windows XP - ThinkPad X22, X23, X24 are on IBM Personal computing support - Installation instructions for Windows XP - ThinkPad X22, X23, X24

I've read many articles here, including Miscellaneous Hardware: cant boot, partition problem Windows XP’s Support Tools

More searching today makes it look like I need to use dskprobe, but that does not work from dos on the X22, and when I connect the drive to my X30 via firewire the drive is not shown by dskprobe, even though the X30 shows the drive okay.

Anilrgowda

fdisk /mbr is not advised with NTFS systems - although it generally works OK. Fixboot and fixmbr - from XP CD recovery console are the correct options. In this instance, it sounds like the machine cannot cope with a drive of this size. Create a 20GB Partition, format and install. See how it goes.