Hi Guys,

As an extension to my original question about vintage Compaq laptop hard drives and compatibity with new drives, I've still not solved this. So I thought I'd start from scatch, with another Compaq laptop, this time a Compaq LTE 5000. I have two of these Compaq LTE 5000 laptops which both work flawlessly with their original drives. So here goes.

Every replacement drive I've tried in this Compaq LTE 5000 laptop is not being seen by the BIOS - and therefore not being seen by the O/S either. On a side note, I do have a 5000 series with a CF to 44 pin IDE adapter that does work, but I'll leave that out of this because I don't know what's so special that this CF to 44 pin IDE adapter works and nothing else seems to work! Anyway...

I put both the old HDD and the potential replacement HDD in my IBM T30 laptop to get the specs. Here are the screenshots when I put eithr drive in my IBM T30 laptop.

Here's the spec of the original Compaq LTE 5000 drive - this works in the Compaq LTE 5000 laptop, proving the disk controller almost definitely works correctly:

Here's the spec of the potential replacement drive. This is made up of a mSATA to 44-pin IDE/PATA adapter (which I actually bought off eBay), and an INNODISK mSATA D150Q 2GB mSATA SSD drive. And heres the disk tool reading:

But the potential replacement drive is not recognised by the Compaq laptop BIOS at all. The BIOS says: No Drive.

Here's what I've tried/verified/summaried:

• The new adapter works correctly. Verified working correctly in an IBM T30 and a IBM T400. Worked in both machines using the subject SSD and another SSD to be sure.
• The SSD adapter works correctly. Verified working correctly in in the above test; and in a Lenovo desktop with a PCI mSATA adapter to 100% sure.
• The compaq Laptop drive works in the T30 as expected. I knew it would, but just ruling as much out as possible.
• The new drive is not even recognised by the Compaq laptop.
• I've also tried a CF to IDE adapter with a 2GB and a 512MB CF card - again, not regognised by the laptop. I've verified the CF cards work, and this also works in my IBM T30.

So, what I'm summarising is: This must be BIOS related. After all, if the BIOS cannot detect the drive... And I can't get any disk overlay software to detect it either. I've even tried a few other programs like WHATIDE, which ignore the BIOS detected HDD specs. But that couldn't see it either. It's as if the drive is not even there. So, I can't even use drive overlay software to fool the BIOS.

So then I thought back to a contribution to my thread on the other forum a member said:

AFAIK, no USB adapter support CHS-only drives.

Whilst in this particular instance it is not USB related, this got me thinking. If the BIOS can only deal with CHS-only drives and my potential replacement drive does not give a CHS signature, perhaps then the BIOS literally switches off the IDE controller? How can I find out if the potential replacement drive even supports CHS-only?

This is pure speculation of course. In truth, I have no idea what's actually going on here.

Any help with this is appreciated, even if it's speculative.