注意：以下皆是技术内容，不喜勿入。

A tragic thing happened to my T400 Laptop last Sunday. I did reboot after installing some software, and suddenly the machine can't initialize its hard disk correctly. It gave the following error message:

Error 2100, hard drive initialization error (2).

I was quite surprised since my laptop has only been used for about 7 or 8 months. Together with Lenovo's so-called AES technique, I think the hard drive is well protected. How can it be broken for such a short period!!!

Then I started to diagnose what was wrong with the laptop. At first, I tried to read BIOS information and do a HDD Diagnosis. But BIOS complained it couldn't find my main hard drive! I was quite shocked and a little panic. Altough I sync most important data to Live Mesh, but I still have a lot of files in that laptop. And reinstalling the whole system takes way too much time and efforts. Then I searched a little bit on Google. Lenovo gives general suggestion on Error 2100: replug the hard drive. I did it, and still didn't work. Then I used Win 7 RC installation CD to boot the machine, and hoped that maybe it could fixe the problem. Win 7 repair tool found the hard drive and recognized all the partitions, files. But the "Attempting repair" procedure didn't stop in a tolerable time. So again, it was a dead end. But this calmed me down a little: my data could be saved in principle.

I searched the problem on Google again. I found a hard driver firmware fix provided by Lenovo since the end of 2006. The fix has been updated a lot of times and the error expands from numerous Thinkpad and hard driver models. It is just ridiculous. At first, I thought maybe the firmware of the hard drive is not compatible with Vista (and above). But then I saw complaints from people using XP. Well, I have to say that Lenovo did a great job of ruining the credibility of Thinkpad. 

I called Lenovo Tech Support on Monday. The support engineer was just so so. He was very kind, but I really doubted his technique skills. The guy couldn't even say diagnosis. Lenovo's solution is trivial: Replace the hard drive for me. Well, it is easy for them and somehow cost saving (hours of fixing hard drive also costs a lot). But it is not very satisfying for me. I need to reinstall the OS and all software I used. The cost Lenovo saves is transferred to me. Also if someone didn't backup her/his data, then it is even worse since Lenovo said they do not provide any data recovery support. I felt lucky that I successfully transferred most of my data from the laptop to a USB hard drive by a Ubuntu Live CD.

Now I'm using the laptop with the new Hitachi hard drive. I wish it will not break so soon, although some models of Hitachi also appeared on the fix list, including the one I am currently using. I took half a day to install Win 7 RC and all the software I use. To not see this thing completely negative, I could only say it is good to get a totally new hard drive since I used BT frequently, with high speed read/write (thx to HK's 30MB bandwidth) on the old one.