I am getting another 600E shortly, mainly to play with and learn about hardware installation. It lacks a hard drive. I have a friend who has offered me the original 40GB hard drive from his T23 (he upgraded his drive) at a very good price. Will I have a compatibility problem installing this in the 600E? Is there anything I should pay special attention to during installation, formatting or partitioning? The 600E has a 400MHz Pentium PII processor with 128 MB of memory. Thanks in advance for suggestions if any.

Sudevan

No compatibility problem. If you have a Windows CD, when given the option during installation, delete any existing partitions, create a new partition, format (preferably NTFS, but FAT32 is OK), then install Windows.

EDIT: I may be a good idea to update the BIOS to the latest version first. At least make sure that the BIOS version you have is Compatible with the version of Windows you are installing. See BIOS readme file for details. Link below for drivers and readme files.

Software and Device Drivers - ThinkPad 600

Definately make sure that the BIOS is up to date first, or it might not recognize the hard drive.

Also, if you are going to load XP, you will need the latest BIOS.

Latest BIOS: Version 1.16 - INET36WW

Thank you both. I will wait until the machine gets here, then follow your advice. I should probably download the BIOS and driver updates to a CD first, then load it on the 600E. The eBay page did not say whether the machine had a CD-ROM, but if it doesn't I can hook up a CD-ROM from one of my other TPs.

Sudevan

AFAIK these BIOS updates have to be applied from a floppy drive. You should be able to find one on e-bay at a fairly good price.

Thanks, GomJabbar. I do have an external floppy drive, so I should be all set. But it is good to know I can do it only from a floppy drive.

Sudevan

I updated my 600E's BIOS to the latest version from CD-R.

I made the standard floppy - running the IBM BIOS utility on my desktop PC.
Then used Nero to create a bootable CD-R - it copied the floppy contents and also created a boot sector from the floppy.

Worked first time no problems.

Post again in this thread if you want more detail.

warwound.

1: Bios updated DO have to be done from the floppy on the 600E

2: My 600e, after update, supported an 80 gig drive no problem

Most laptop drives, assuming they physically fit, will work

A quick progress report: The 600E arrived in lovely condition -- looks almost brand new and certainly seems a steal for $96! Fortunately, tfflivemb happened to be in town, so we looked at the machine together. The BIOS had already been updated so we tried to load Win XP from the 40GB hard disk my friend had given me. We ran into problems, very probably because of a faulty or dead CMOS battery. I had suspected this because when I first got the machine ( minus the hard drive ) it would power up to errors 161 and 163. So I have ordered a new CMOS battery ( cheap on eBay ), and I will install that when it gets here ( tfflivemb showed me how easy this was ). I'm beginning to learn more abt the insides of these fascinating machines and it is fun.

Thanks to the others who added information since my last post.

Sudevan