Jump to content

D430 & Toshiba MK2431 240GB Drive


trag

Recommended Posts

My ultimate ambition is to have a triple booting D430 with OSX, Windows XP, and Ubuntu. That's a lot of stuff for one of these little guys, so a large capacity hard drive seems like a good idea. So I bought a couple (I have more than one D430) of the MK2431's by Toshiba to provide 240GB of capacity.

 

My ultimate question for this thread, which I've moved up here, because I wrote way too much background, is: Do you have any suggestions for getting XP installed on this hard drive?

 

I am going slowly, testing one OS out at a time. And since XP was already on the D430, and I need XP for my chip programmer (connects through the parallel port on the Media Dock), That's what I tested first.

 

I'm sorry that I'm not going to discuss OSX immediately here, and if that's a problem, I'll go somewhere else, but I haven't found the Windows forums such as Anandtech especially knowledgeable (willing to help, but not very knowledgeable) on this topic, and I'm hoping that the folks here may have focused on the issues involved a little more closely.

 

From reading the forum topics, it appears that no one has reported back on using the MK2431 with OSX. When I reach that point, I will share my experiences.

 

Anyway, where I am now is that the XP installation disk will not install XP to the MK2431 because the XP installer does not detect a hard drive. I've been chasing this issue for about three months off and on (not a lot of spare time), so I've tried many things and am pretty much out of ideas.

 

1. Windows XP installer does not see MK2431 hard drive.

2. Windows Vista installer does see MK2431 hard drive and installs and runs just fine.

3. Trying to install XP after installing Vista, the XP installer still doesn't see the hard drive.

4. XP with slipstreamed AHCI drivers from Intel's Rapid Storage Technology update does not see hard drive.

5. Slipstreaming astore.inf (not sure about spelling, also contained in RST update) in addition/instead of ahci drivers does not help.

6. The MK2431 is 512 bytes per sector logical, but 4096 bytes per sector physical.

7. Looking at various drives with Gnome Partition Editor on a Live CD shows the MK2431 as a DOS style partitioning (MBR?) with an NTFS partition. This is exactly the same as the stock 80 GB drive which does work with XP. I tried various partitioning schemes without success.

8. The drive works great as an external drive in a USB enclosure but the XP install disk won't install to the external drive.

 

So, it comes down to the fact that Vista installs and XP won't. What driver or capability does Vista have, which XP lacks? And is there some way to add that capability to XP?

 

The drive is an Advanced Format Drive as shown by the 4096 byte physical sector size.

 

The folks at anandtech.com thought I should install the latest AHCI drivers, even though the interface is not SATA, on the theory that this would add support for Advanced Format Drives. It didn't help.

 

My current hypothesis is that updated AHCI drivers in XP do add support for Advanced Format Drives, but the AHCI drivers only work on SATA interfaces. Whoever created the updated drivers assumed that all AF Drives would be SATA and didn't bother to add AFD support to the drivers for IDE interfaces. Yet, in Vista, such support seems to exist.

 

It is entirely possible that the MK2431 is the *only* AFD with a PATA interface. All other AFDs seem to be large capacity SATA drives.

 

My hypothesis may be down a completely wrong alley...

 

I would appreciate any helpful or humorous comments. Once I get XP loading, I'll move on to OSX, but this is where I'm starting. Or, if it just isn't possible to get XP to load, I'll have to re-evaluate my plan. Maybe see if Win 7 in XP mode will work properly with my chip programmer's software and the parallel port in the Dell dock.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

do you have the latest bios on both hdd and d430? also make sure the hdd is not for a ipod

 

Yes, latest BIOS on the laptop. I don't believe that Toshiba has released any updates for the hard drive. The drive is used in Ipods, but that's not a magical disqualification. There's a physical or software reason when equipment is incompatible. In this case, it's frustratingly close to compatible, given that it works like a dream in Vista but stubbornly refuses to be visible to XP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...