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 http://bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm - 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 http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/si...cid=MIGR-44843

I've read many articles here, including http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hard..._20483398.html http://www.auldfart.co.uk/howto/xpsupport.html

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.

Solution

Does your Bios recognise the drive correctly, even if it does I'd recommend updating your bios as it may not recognise the drive. Are you using a restore disk or an original Windows XP CD, if so don't use Dos at all, but instead boot directly up using the Windows XP CD you should than be able to format and configure the drive from the Windows XP Setup. FDISK is really for 9x type systems, I've never used it since moving to Windows 2000/XP CD.

If it was my drive and once confirmed that the computer is recognising the HDD correctly, I'd actually use Symantecs Ghost software to take an image of the old 20GB than reimage the new drive, that way you don't have to worry about setting anything up. Ghost images by default just fill up the remaining space as empty space.

Anyhow that's my 2 cents.