harddrive compatiability issues with T43 thinkpad laptop

My T43 thinkpad laptop with an IDE interface will not recognize my 320 IDE gb harddrive . I cannot recall the entire message that comes up, but I know the message has 'not related to firmware' sentence within the entire message that pops up on my screen everytime I insert my 320 gb harddrive into my T43 thinkpad laptop. This harddrive was compatible with my former R51 thinkpad laptop. I checked the specs for the T43 ibm thinkpad and other people with T43 thinkpad laptop, some of them have 320 IDE gb hard drives inserted into the harddrive slot of their T43 thinkpad laptop. Should I alter the BIOS settings? I used the covering for my R51 laptop into the harddrive slot of my new T43 harddrive. Does that make a difference about the compatiability of the harddrive with the T43 thinkpad laptop.

Do you think that it has do with my OS that is installed on each harddrive as well? For the harddrive that came with my T43 thinkpad laptop, linux is installed on the 60gb ide harddrive, and windows vista is installed on my 320 gb ide harddrive.

 

I see this thread is getting 11 views but no solution has been proposed yet. Is my problem even resolvable?