Ugh, took a bit longer look at this T43 I'm typing on now. The more I learn about Thinkpads, the less I know.
Booted this one up with a DSL cd and UBCD (both live linux). Ran fdisk in DSL and it couldn't find the hdd despite it having XP installed on it. Booted UBCD and ran a hdd utility called Active Partition Recovery. It sees the hdd, but no partitions. Booted into Insert (linux) from the UBCD and fdisk finds the hdd and one partition. Ran an hdd utility from Insert called qtparted (v0.4.4) which showed two very small hidden partitions and a primary NTFS partition.
Then went and perused the bios. "Config" has no hdd settings, save for something under "Network" enabling/disabling HDD DMA. The IBM Security Chip is disabled on this unit (also in the bios). IBM Predesktop Area has 3 settings: Secure, Normal, and Disabled. "Startup" should show your hdd.
A couple of suggestions here:
a) This is a newer piece of hardware (the live cd's don't find a nic!), so run an XP SP2 cd.
b) Try toggling the IBM Predesktop Area setting to disabled. You can always restore the defaults.
c) Anything you find out, let me know. These things are a bear.
I'm still going to call IBM for support and will let you know.
Back to the grind...
edit -- here we go, this explains quite a bit:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=27721
another edit -- a wee bit more...
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic...84430cb274dc29
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