So I bought a secondhand Lenovo Thinkpad X220 on eBay and I think I may have killed on the day it arrived!
the X220 is a nice little 12 inch Sandy i5 ThinkPad. It came with an old 360Gb mechanical hard drive. I pulled this old drive and swapped it for a 256Gb SSD. I flashed an ISO of Ubuntu-Mate to a thumb drive. The install went OK. On reboot, the laptop became unresponsive, no lights no fan just off. The next restart I get an error at boot 2100 Detection error on HDD0. I have looked through the BIOS and the drive is not detected. So swapped to the mechanical drive that was working and that gets the same error. I have tested several drives all give the same error. These drives work fine on my Windows desktop. I can repartition them and format in Windows. If I boot into Ubuntu-Mate live environment on the laptop and look at the drive with Gparted they do not show up. It’s like the SATA controller has bricked/died. I have had a look at the physical connector and I can see no damage. I was a little concerned as I don’t have the HDD cage or rubber sledges. It’s on order from another eBay seller and will be with me in a couple of days.
Has anyone heard of this type of issue? A working laptop being rendered useless by installing Linux on an SSD? I have been running Linux since the mid 90’s back in the day you could do nasty things to a monitor but Linux is beyond these issues these days.
Anyone with some experience with Thinkpads can help me out because this one has me stumped. Maybe there is something in the BIOS that I’m missing. Some quirk in the UEFI that I’m unaware of that is tripping me up.
Right now my little ThinkPad is little more than a paperweight if I can’t get it to recognise a hard drive and I will have lost the £100 quid I spend and makes the Dock and optical drive and other bits and bobs I have on back order somewhat redundant. Thank god I didn’t order the extra RAM I wanted.