Hey guys, recently my HD in my dell crashed and I needed to replace it. I pulled out my IBM thinkpad that I still use once in a while and grabbed the 20GB from there, and now my Dell works. Problem is no HD including the 20GB now works on the IBM and I wanna get it back up with a 10GB. The computer recognized the HD but doing a test in the bios it gives me some Error 81. Booting from a disk the C drive is there, but its invalid media. Fdisk does not recognize and HDs. Help pls.

"Fdisk does not recognize and HDs". What does this statement mean? Fdisk can't see any drive at all? Did you select Y when asked about large drives?

I searched using: "Error 81" thinkpad on the web Getting the Error 81 appears to be a Linux only problem. E.g. Linux's attempt to call the PCI BIOS during start-up results in an "Error 81 when fetching IRQ routing table". http://home.comcast.net/~fbui/Linux... "BIOS bug 81 is related to acpi and timer chip pin #2 ??" http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showth... Try NOT using a Linux bootdisk or bootable CD. If that doesn't apply, or if that doesn't help, take a look at the User's manual or similar for your model - older Thinkpad manuals often have lists of many possible error codes. "Problem is no HD including the 20GB now works on the IBM " What do you mean by that? The hard drive isn't recognized at all, or it is but it won't load the operating system? If a hard drive already has XP installed on it, if you transfer it to another computer that has significantly different hardware, XP often will not boot into Windows - typically, you see the first bit of Windows graphics, then a black screen with a blinking cursor top left and nothing further happens - that is normal. However, you can only easily fix that situation without losing the data already on the drive if XP was installed from a regular XP CD. "Fdisk does not recognize and HDs" I'm assuming you should have typed "Fdisk does not recognize ANY HDs" Are the bios settings correct regarding hard drive detection? E.g. if parameters were specified for the 20gb, they won't work with the 10gb drive, and visa versa, and the drive probably won't be recognized as bootable if it was before. That should be Auto detection by the method Auto or LBA, or similar. The Normal or Large method will not detect the full size of either drive. "invalid media" Does the 10gb have any data on it? If it does, does it have an operating system installed on it?

81 is a power on test (POST), part of the 80 series. It means that it passed POST for the 10 - 70 tests. Seems the lenovo site is down right now. Search for numeric error codes thinkpad for your model. They might still offer a diag floppy for that model. You run it at boot and press I think f2 to start the diag. I used to have all of them. I suspect that you have to go into bios and get or allow it to update to the new drive. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

From what OS version are you running fdisk? What OS was originally on the 10 gig?

Running the test in bios for the hd and you get an error 81. Is this the error on the hd or system board? I've see this on the system board but not for the hd. Error for a hd will come as numeric codes like I9990301. http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s... You more likely will need to pull the hd out then reseat it.