Hi there, I just bought a ThinkPad T42 from ebay. The laptop appears good, as the initial BIOS shows up and is looking for a hard drive. It didn't come with a caddy or hard drive cover, so I ordered a caddy from another ebay store. Got that, put the hard drive in the caddy and installed it. Now, the BIOS recognizes the hard drive (i.e the hard drive specs show up in the device information in BIOS), but the OS is never loaded. I just see blinking cursor at the top of the screen indefinitely. The hard drive is good and has a good Windows XP installation on it, as I can use it in another laptop fine. Is it possible that the laptop wouldn't load up simply because there wasn't a hard drive cover? I find that hard to believe. Any suggestions, advice, or help would be appreciated.

Did you look to see if there is a harddrive installed? Seems add that the cover should be off unless someone had business in there. I assume you are aware of all the security/ anti-theft provisions on modern laptops. Even if there is a harddrive in the laptop, if it is not the ORIGINAL drive the anti-theft provisions may not allow the laptop to function.

Yes, as I mentioned, the hard drive appears to be installed, as it shows up in the BIOS device info when specifying the boot order. I'm not familiar with anti-theft provisions. However, if you can't replace a hard drive on a laptop, what use is it?

IBM Adds Anti-Theft Tech to ThinkPad "all T-series laptops give you the ability to password protect your user ID, CMOS, and your hard drive with unique passwords - a significant and important feature you will definitely want to take advantage of." Ebay

It doesn't appear that any security or protection is enabled, as I can go into BIOS and set or disable various passwords or biometric settings. If the laptop was locked down, I suspect that I wouldn't be able to change those settings. Wouldn't you agree? I suspect the hard drive cover and caddy were removed because the laptop was used in a corporate environment and the only way to be sure that the data wouldn't be accessed by the new owner would be to remove the hard drive.

I am not up to speed on each laptop security features but on some laptops replacing only the drive will not get the unit working. If that is not the case then you should be able to configure the harddrive in the BIOS (setup). Have you entered the BIOS to see if anything is amiss there? I think that unit came with an optional second drive in the removable bay. If so, there should be a boot order setting.

firstly, if win xp was put on the hard drive when that drive was in a pc with different make and model chips on the motherboard then i would not expect it to boot when moved to this laptop. XP is designed like that. How far it does get towards booting differs on different PCs. Does the laptop have CD drive, will it start with a XP CD (need to set boot order to cd first in bios). if you then go through the options as if you want to instal XP to the point where it asks you to confirm the disc and partition you want to put it on does it show the hard disc there as present (if you abort at this point then it has not started the instal process and will not have messed up what is on the hard disc)