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General discussion

Problem with wife's Lenovo T61 w/XP Pro

by Steven Haninger Jul 3, 2009 3:58AM PDT

While prepping the laptop for a larger hard drive, I found that the current drive (Seagate 100 gig SATA I) was not visible in Disk Management. The CD ROM device was there. In further troubleshooting I find that no USB external hard drive partition will show in disk management but USB CD ROM devices will. The hard drive shows in device manager and explorer just fine. With the exception of an an occasion shut down issue, the laptop appears to be working normally. In attempting to run a few diagnostics, I find that the Lenovo "Disk Doctor" shows no problems with the hard drive but, I cannot schedule chkdsk /f. It reboots normally without running the program. sfc /scannow runs and shows no errors. I also noted that no system restore points were being made though system restore was enabled. I disabled/re-enabled system restore and it seems to be ok now. I've also re-enabled all default services but no luck. I cannot run defrag as well. I've not yet gone the repair installation as what we have is the recovery media burned when we first got the laptop. I'm not wanting to risk making matters worse at the moment. I've made an Acronis image of the drive in its current condition in case this happens.
As I said, the laptop seems to run ok. I don't want to clone the old hard drive with problems on it, however. Any thoughts as to why no chkdks /f or the disk showing either of it's partitions in disk management?

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2 Posts

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So the problem

by deniceels Jul 4, 2009 5:39PM PDT

is the laptop not seeing the external usb harddisk? Insufficient power could be the cause of the 'disappearing' act. Try removing the external USB optical drive and leaving only the ext harddisk plugged in.

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No...it's any hard drive partition

by Steven Haninger Jul 4, 2009 8:08PM PDT

including external (USB) as I noted in my initial post. It shows the internal CD ROM and will show a USB CD ROM. It won't show a USB flash drive. I posted this in the XP forum later on. At this point, I'm down to trying a full repair installation. I don't want to do a full recovery as it's not my laptop and is otherwise working. I'm suspecting a corrupt registry as one other thing of note was that I could not bring up the command window using the "command"...only "cmd" as it generated some sort of 16 bit error. I was able to find a registry edit that fixed this so I know something did damage the registry. Thanks for the reply.

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