Ghost 2003, a ThinkPad T41, and Me

IBM recently released a firmware upgrade for one of the hard drives that is used in their ThinkPad, this time out it’s for a 60GB drive that runs at 7200rpm. I have a similar drive – both are TravelStar drives, from Hitachi – and while mine is 60GB it runs at 5400rpm. Since I’ve had trouble with IBM’s Active Hard Drive Protection System (APS) – trouble as in I think it’s what has reliably, yet randomly, crashed my ThinkPad with blue screens of death – I’ve been eagerly awaiting a new firmware update… (the moral of the story is how neat Ghost 2003 is, but it takes a little while to get there)

Ordinarily, when a company releases firmware for Model “A” and I own Model “a”, and they don’t specifically say that Model “A”‘s firmware is also for Model “a”, I wouldn’t install the firmware on your hardware. When I saw the notice for the 7200 drive, I started doing some searching to see if they released an update for the 5400 drive. No such luck.

Since IBM doesn’t make the TravelStar line anymore – Hitachi does now – I thought I’d check with the folks at Hitachi for some updated firmware – after all the T40 and T41 both have models that ship with the 40GB and 60GB 5400 drives… it’s not like I bought some random no-name HD to put in my T41 – I even called IBM support to confirm the compatibility with the APS and they told me it would be fine. I pop over to Hitachi’s site where I’m told “If you think you need a firmware upgrade, please email us” or something to that effect.

OK, then. If I think I need it. Uh-huh. If someone knows what firmware is and they come to your web site, they already think they need it, and usually, they know they need it. But fine, I’ll play along. So I email Hitachi which gives me a “If you think you need the firmware, give us a call”. !! I’d be more inclined to buy a new drive from a different manufacturer than I would be to pick up the phone and try to explain to a human that I think I need new firmware. Hitachi then says that “IBM tested and certified their installation to only work with the proper drives.”

This to me is a go-ahead-and-download-and-try the offered firmware! I decided to download it and run it: It shows that I have version A55A and that it has version B55A to offer me – found the correct drive, drive model, and firmware version that I have, so that should be it, right? *flash* *flash* *flash* Reboot. Fan Error. *pause* No panic …yet. Reboot and go into the BIOS – it asks me to press F1 to go into the BIOS startup. I reset to defaults and reboot. Windows XP returns alive, well, and happy.

It wasn’t until later that I heard that the new firmware “broke” the IBM-installed “Recovery” partition of my hard drive. I didn’t even notice it when I went into the BIOS: instead of getting a simple menu, I should have gotten a full screen graphic with 8-bars of IBM logo goodness, but I didn’t. So what does that mean? Nothing! It means that I can’t restore my PC from this shadowy partition, but since I have the restore CD’s I don’t have to care aboutthis. I am a bit “irked” at having lost 6GB of my HD to a feature I can’t use, but it’s a non-issue with having 41GB free. However, I know that sooner or later I will re-partition this hard to get back my recovery partition. I know me. It’s only a matter of time.

Enter Symantec’s Ghost 2003. I had installed and tried to use Ghost 2001. While it saw my XP/NTFS partition without any issues, it was sightly cumbersome. Actually, it was an outright nightmare. The HD’s had to be internal, if I wanted to make an image of a drive. I could have hooked two machines together with a USB cable, but I couldn’t find the “right” cable in the few places I looked – the network hook up was non-compliant and uncooperative, seeing as none of the offered drivers supported either of my network cables. Also, whenever I wanted to change my configuration I would have to boot to XP, make a boot disk, reboot via the floppy drive and try again. On top of that, if I boot off the USB floppy drive, I can’t use the USB features of Ghost. It was ugly.

But Ghost 2003… ah, what a difference two years makes to software! Slick familiar-Symantec UI. Wizards help at all turns. Supports USB1.1 and USB2 and Firewire drives. Supports CD’s and DVD’s and network mounted drives. It reboots for you with a virtual partition and avoids floppy drives, when you ask it to. While I’ve haven’t been able to use my Firewire PCMCIA cards with my Firewire enclosures (no power comes through this card) I do have a USB1.1 and USB2 enclosures. First time out I had to use USB1.1 and I imaged my entire HD (about 14GB worth uncompressed) into a 8GB image; took about 2 1/2 hours. Next time out I used a different enclosure, which allowed me to use USB2; same image took about 35 minutes. The entire image in almost a half an hour: how freakin’ cool is that?

Simply put, this buys me the flexibility of knowing that I can blow away the entire hard drive and get exactly back to the state that I’m at now. I can get the recovery partition back (which will lose all the data on the drive) and let it restore the whole initial IBM state – that’s fine. But rather than having to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-install XP (again) I just restore the image and be exactly back to where I started.

And since it took me so long to get this machine configure like this, I’d much rather restore it’s state than start over. Again. Great application, if the restore works as well as the backup features!


15 thoughts on “Ghost 2003, a ThinkPad T41, and Me”

  1. Yet another update to myself… I wrote this yesterday and lo! I decided to try an restore the missing partition tonight. No only did this new firmware blow “lose” a partition but it destroyed a good part of the restoring that the IBM Restore Disc’s can do, but Ghost responded well. VERY well, in fact – totally blew my doors off that I’m back on the my notebook after a 13 minute restore. Simply incredible!

  2. This reminds me, I need to backup more often. Last night my Pocket PC blew up on me when I installed Two Peaks Biz Beam. Unfortunately for me, my latest backup was 2 months old. Not fun. Lucky me, I didn’t lose any reg codes or anything.

  3. when i start ibm t41 i can not find press F1

    and i need it to solve the FAN ERROR that i can not boot into the system because of it.

    please help me

    .

    cordially.

  4. Does anyone know why when Ghosting 2003 from a Hitachi Travelstar 39T2545 (40GB) onto a Hitachi Travelstar 39T2547 (60GB) the Laptop refuses to star from the HDD. Can anyone help me out

    Thanks

  5. Charly, if u still have the problem contact me thru mail or yahoo IM coolboy_142. I will be able to help you.

  6. can anyone help with T41 boot problems. i tried to re-install windows xp prof, from orginal disk not IBM recovery, now I can’t load XP properly it stalls, I don’t have IBM disk… does anyone have one goin?

    thanks

  7. IBM T41

    When my daughter turns her laptop on FAN ERROR appears and it beeps and shuts down. I bought this remanufactured and do not know how to fix this problem. Do i need to take back to the remanufacturer or can you tell me how to fix or reset the laptop. We have only had it since Christmas 2007

  8. Sorry for this much-later question… Did you ever figure out if the hard drive protection system was in fact causing the blue screens? I just purchased a used T41 and have had similar issues, with similar suspicions. Were you able to eliminate the crashing?

  9. Well, I’ve moved on to a T60p and that was over a year ago… I *did* clear up the crashes, though. If I remember correctly, drives updated whatever problem I was having with the APS and the other random crashes were attributed to faulty memory (lasted like 2 hours – I added new memory and started crashing, that was easy) and using the then-IBM Access Connection and/or the Intel WiFi card. I remember that once I got rid of the AC software and switched to a ThinkPad WiFi card *ALL* of my problems went away.

  10. Thanks for the quick reply, Randy. I’m nowhere near as proficient as you sound regarding hardware and firmware, but at least I know there’s hope. The T41 is a solid machine in most other respects.

  11. I have a thinkpad and 2 ghost CDs of the recovery partition but although I can restore the partiton (ghost 2003) from the CDs. I cannot restore the OS by going into the bios and enabling recovery. I am starting from a blank HDD. Any suggestions?

    Thanks

    Paul…

  12. I have that error: “fan error” in a thinkpad t23 series. But the fan is ok!. Just only pressing “ESC” i can go on, but i don’t like that error. �how can i disble that check in the bios?. please write me (acunha@telefonica.net).

    thanks a lot


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