[ltp] Upgrade hard drive

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:26:02 -0500
> James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com> dijo:
> > > Isn't there some kind of whitelist of accepted disks in thinkpad's bios?
>    
> > Not that I've heard of.  That sort of thing could leave you unable to
> > replace the hard drive at some time in the future.
> 
> The purpose is to force you to buy your replacement hard drive from
> Lenovo. Or so I was told by the dealer when I bought my T61 a couple of
> years ago.

No, the purpose of it is to make sure you have an HD which has APS firmware
and also a working ATA SECURITY FEATURE SET, without which the HD passwords
and other such stuff won't work.

IBM actually *ADDED* support for what they wanted to some HDs, often
removing other stuff from the firmware.  I know my original Hitachi didn't
have one or two extra features the datasheet for the non-IBM drive
specified, and it had EXTRA features added by IBM (UNLOAD IMMEDIATE for the
APS system being one) that were not in the datasheet.

Now, I don't claim it was the best way to go about it, but the annoying T43
HD lock really wasn't done just to force you to buy an IBM or Lenovo HD for
the heck of it.  The latest BIOS lets you use any HD, it will beep on boot,
though.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh