Lenovo Thinkpad X230 Laptop Hard Drive issues

[rouge_18]

Hello all, I have a strange issue with my Lenovo Thinkpad X230 Laptop. The hard drive will sometimes recognize and will sometimes not. I bought a new hard drive and it recognized once and then the problem would sometimes happen and it sometimes wouldn't. Both hard drives are known-working and they have worked on other PCs. The hard drive slot on this laptop is one on the side and you slide the hard drive in. I theorized that maybe the hard drives were getting loose while in the slot so I applied electrical tape around the sides of the hard drive and it kept it in place but the problem sometimes still persisted. A Skype contact of mine (who works in a data center) said that the problem might be the connection to the motherboard itself and that I would have to take the whole laptop apart and solder something (which I don't know how to do.) I was hoping someone here would be able to recognize what the actual problem is and maybe someone has experienced something similar.

Thank you and best wishes! 🙂

 

[Laptop_Nerd]

Hi,

You're friend might be correct about a loose connection between the motherboard and the HDD connector. What you can do to save time and money is to try and use the HDD as an external drive to a different PC first using an enclosure and see if the same problem will persist or not just to make sure that it's not the HDD that has the problem.

Here's a sample of a HDD enclosure.
http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392032

If the HDD used as an external HDD is still getting disconnected that means it's the problem with the HDD but if not that means it's the motherboard.

 

[Kirk_2]

Do you have the bumper rails ?
http/www.amazon.com/Driver-Cover-Screws-Lenovo-ThinkPad/dp/B008SO09JM
Using anything else with the rails is needless and if improperly applied smashes your drive lid onto a moving spindle.
An SSD wouldn't have that problem.
All ThinkPad's, most Lenovo's include Active Hard Drive Protection, an renowned instant spindle parking BIOS feature configurable in Windows, if it becomes damaged from a rude system update, if the software version drifts and becomes unstable inside Windows, it can fail to relinquish protective control of the disk leaving it unpowered like a comatosed chauffeur... driving your car.
Disable hard drive protection in the control panel, does the drive still have issues AFTER BEING PROPERLY installed with bumpers and disabled hdd protection?
A loose SATA controller, would have to be so loose that your system drive would fail to power more frequently upon every reboot.
Take a look at it and you'll notice the Thinkpad SATA controller is an ingot and doesn't come loose unless you're intentionally punishing it, Volvo asks us for safety advice.

 

[ffg7]

don't think it is the sata connector at fault but the onboard sata controller as ran into that problem with a customer's desktop computer. I changed the psu, hard drive & ram til it finally gave me an error message could not find the hard drive. replaced his sata drive with an ide drive as his motherboard also had that connector & the computer has worked for years with no problem.