Some Thinkpads (& other laptops maybe) have incompatible IDE

[Mogge]

I was thinking IDE is well established therefor very reliable.

That might be true, but i got fooled!
-The IDE interface in my laptop talk nonstandard commands!!

I learned it the hard way when i plugged my standard IDE drive from my old Thinkpad, into the newer T43, and set gparted to work on it. poff, and the file allocation table got corrupted.

I *guess* this is not a fault of gparted, nor kernel, nor drivers. Well, I thought so first as the machine have been reliable with another drive... but after some googling i found out that this computer actually use SATA controller, and then a built-in SATa to IDE converter that converts also non-IDE-standard commands to the drive, so in order to be reliable we need to use a non standard IDE-drive, or rather a drive loaded with non-standard firmware from IBM/Lenovo.

IBM/Lenovo actually have a bootable iso for download to upgrade a lot of drives, unfortunately it does not work. Some people havve come up with workaronds, unfortumnately none I have tried works in my setup, but that is another story. If you have a thinkpad, look here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_non-ThinkPad_hard_disks

I guess it is best to use an external USB-IDE interface if you want to edit a standard IDE drive on such thinkpad.