Lenovo x61/x60 Tablet PC – Error 2100 at Boot

A few weeks ago on my way home from CES I was confronted with a “Error 2100 – Hard drive initialization error” on my Lenovo X61 Tablet PC.  It was not good and there was NO way to access the drive – it would not boot. There was no external access to the drive. Booting into Linux didn’t show the drive either.   Nothing worked!  It wasn’t too big of a deal because I do frequent backups so the only thing I lost was a few GBM e-mails  because they were POP and on my drive since the last backup.

The guys at Lenovo worked with me and I was able to get a new drive…  Not fun, but I was up and running in short order.

Then comes last night…  I started up my computer and guess what???  Another “Error 2100” – so much for watching the Super Bowl over SlingBox…  I went back to another computer and started to do some searching – I found that a little over a week ago there was a firmware update for the drives used in the x60/x61 that will solve this problem – from the fix page:

Notes:
– This firmware update includes the fix for the case on a system with Microsoft Windows Vista, that the system may become to display the following error message at each power on, and then cannot boot from the hard drive. “2100: Initialization error on HDD0 (Main hard disk drive)”

Perfect I say!!  I did  the download, created the bootable ISO, put the drive in and PRESTO!!  I am booting again!!!

Moral of the story?  1. Check the link and see if you need to do the Hard Drive firmware update 2. It’s a good example of how regular backups are not just beneficial, but critical!