Lenovo's Tablet PCs Come Bundled With HDD Issues

It seems that's something in the air that makes Lenovo's X60, X61 and Thinkpad T61 models of Tablet PC to suddenly stop working. More and more reports claim that the portable UMPC would refuse to boot out of the blue (bad choice of words, since the screen goes black) on the account of an "Error 2100 - Hard drive initialization error".

The error may strike without any prior warnings, especially after the tablet has been shut down or restarted. Right after the usual POST screen, the user is warned that the drive could not be initialized, thus, the boot process gets interrupted. It also seems that the error is operating system-independent, since booting into Linux won't recognize the disk either.

According to the Lenovo support website, the "Initialization Error on HDD0" may occur because of cables that are not connected / partially connected to the device, main hard drive faults or system board faults. Given the fact that the disk makes a loud, clicking sound upon boot should pretty much isolate the problem, but it seems that the malfunction is not caused by a hardware error, and you'd rather blame it on a messed-up firmware version.

The error occurs on the systems that are running Windows Vista. The Lenovo support team issued a patch that should solve the glitch if you are running the above-mentioned operating system.

"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," reads a support note on their website.

Lenovo's Tablet PCs are using the Fujitsu MHW2xxxBH hard-disk drives as storage media, and the problem occurs because of a corrupted firmware version that had been written on them. The affected firmware models are 00840019 and 00840024, so if you are the unlucky owner of a Fujitsu HDD, you'd rather visit this link and apply the critical update.