[ltp] Crashes on boot with new HD

[Helen Borrie]

At 04:32 PM 9/10/2009, you wrote:

>Here is an update:
>
>It really does crash. The longest I've waited is about 7 or 8 minutes.
>
>I was convinced there was something wrong with the drive after installing different distros with no success. I got a Western Digial 320GB, 7200rpm and SAME PROBLEM! So I'm sure it's something with the laptop... I don't think hardware because my old drive works perfectly fine!
>
>I updated the BIOS, nothing. I tried the hard drive fireware update, nothing.
>
>Am I missing something? Is there something I'm supposed to do other than install the drive?
>
>I need a bigger hard drive! I though about the heat thing... but then I remember there being a 7200rpm option on mine... so that *shouldn't* be an issue right?

I don't know whether it's relevant to your situation...but when I took delivery of my T60, it had a 60GB HDD 5400 rpm which I immediately replaced with a 250GB 7200 rpm.  I wasn't getting problems with Mandriva 2008-1 on that box.  I saw that your startup was creating a RAM disk, which mine doesn't, so i have no idea whether that makes any difference between the two Linux setups.  

But I definitely was having a crash problem with the Windows installation - blue-screening at random with one of those idiotic "parity check error" messages.  As it got more frequent (3 or more crashes a day when running Windows), I scoured around and came up with a thread from the Lenovo forums where someone who seemed to be a Lenovo support person told the OP to check the BIOS for the AHCI setting.  There is apparently NO BIOS version in existence for the T60s that provides reliable AHCI support. 

I knew that mine was set for AHCI, because I remembered setting it deliberately myself for no particularly good reason.  ;-) When I switched mine back to the generic 'combined' setting (I forget the actual name of the option itself but I think it just means 'IDE') the problem disappeared - no more crashes for more than a month now, even tho' I've been running the T60 24/7 as an Apache 2 server under WinXP for a project I'm doing.

Helen