Thinkpads Forum

Hello everyone,
I though I would give it a chance
If someone is willing to sell an PowerPC Thinkpad (8x0 series), give me a shout!
Thanks,
Val

what are you offering..?

i have one in my dusty collection with the camera but no hard drive..
it is ex-boeing i was told when i acquired it some years ago..
thus the HDD went into the shredder..

As a heads-up to anybody considering one of these--they are ridiculously rare, and one in good condition is darn near impossible to find. That said, be aware that the hard drives are NOT easily sourced today, since they're 2.5" SCSI drives.

i have been told that some apple macbooks use or used at one time 2.5 inch SCSI drives..
BUT, as i mentioned to the person interested in my 860 RS6000 its not the HDD but rather the HDD caddy that will be really tough to find..

having done some special connectors at one time i would think someone with a yen for one of these who is handy with a soldering iron (pen in this case) a connector could be made..

but i am not one to do it for sure..

BillMorrow wrote:i have been told that some apple macbooks use or used at one time 2.5 inch SCSI drives..
BUT, as i mentioned to the person interested in my 860 RS6000 its not the HDD but rather the HDD caddy that will be really tough to find..

having done some special connectors at one time i would think someone with a yen for one of these who is handy with a soldering iron (pen in this case) a connector could be made..

but i am not one to do it for sure..

You are correct, the PowerBook 100, 500, and Duo (68k models only) series all used SCSI drives. Unfortunately, those were some of the really early PowerBooks, so the drives are going to be even lower-capacity than what you'd likely find for the ThinkPads. Heck, I've got a PowerBook 180 somewhere at home which has a ~40MB SCSI drive in it (if it still works)...but it's too small to be practical.

yup..
too bad the HDD went into the shredder..

still, there could be some somewhere..

Here you go: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-Apple- ... 1039885469
It's an IBM drive!

I swear I saw one of these a few years ago at a flea market (hard to miss that camera), really regret not picking it up...

PM sent to OP

if you look at the label on the apple HDD it says it is designed and manufactured to apple specification..
it would be a big whoops to buy it, make an interface cable for it and then find out it won't run on an IBM thinkpad..

I'm not sure if these use some kind of proprietary scsi connector or not, but I recall reading that you can adapt a compact flash card to scsi, so perhaps you can construct a makeshift ssd drive for one of these?

TuuS wrote:I recall reading that you can adapt a CompactFlash card to SCSI

Yes, the Macintosh community have been doing it for years.
User report in Low End Mac Mailbag
User report in 68k Macintosh Liberation Army Forums

This is going from memory on a subject that isn't related to this topic even remotely, but what I was referring to is building a PC to use as a NAS server where you can use a device like a compact flash or usb card to run the operating system. One person claimed to use an adapter to convert the compact flash card to scsi. I don't know if it converted to a scsi 1/2 50pin ribbon, or a scis3 connector, or what, but there are many different adapters and judging by the age of these drivies I'm guessing they are scsi1 or 2, so if you can physically fit an adapter in the drive bay along with a modern 16gb CF card, it would probably give you better performance then a 10-15yo scsi drive and more then suffice to breath some life into one of these rare creatures.

However I'm no expert on these systems, never had one, but I have modded some antique IBM systems like the ps2 model P70 luggable that I upgraded from a 386DX-25 upto AMD 586-133, and and also scrapped the proprietary IBM 60mb drive and installed a 528mb SCSI. I actually still have the beast, it's sitting in a box in pieces, just can't bring myself to carry it to the curb lol

I also modded a ps2 L40sx which predated the "thinkpad" brand name, but I consider to be the first real sucessful IBM notebook. I had it running a Cyrix (clip on) CPU upgrade. They actually worked quite well, probably even have a couple laying around if I could find them. It required making a custom heatsink and some spacers to raise the keyboard about 1/16th inch to make room for the chip/heatsink, but it didn't look obvious and the slightly raised keyboard was well worth the performance boost the cpu gave.

I love to see these classics revived and in operation. I don't know if there is any possible way to mod one to use a CF (or other flash memory) card as I suggested, but there may be something that can be adapted from a scsi to get the system running.

Good luck if you're inclined to try, and my apology for the nostalgic ramble lol

this is something for someone with all the spec info, a "scope", good soldering skills and a very long deep winter weekend..

which will keep me from even thinking about attempting such mods..

It would surely be a lot of work if you had to make and solder all the connectors. I was actually reading an interesting article on a macbook forum where someone was doing just this, converting a CF card to use as a scsi harddrive to replace a 2.5" scsi. My initial thoughts were that a device might already exist that allows for this, but my guess is even if you found a scsi to CF adapter, it wouldn't be the same type of scsi connector that a 2.5" drive uses.

If anyone is curious, the thread can be viewed here...

http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=15402

I definitely agree with bill, it sounds like a lot of work and I wouldn't know where to begin sourcing the parts and technical data needed. This does sound like something where the first person to sort it all out would be a hero to anyone else trying to resurrect one of these machines.

Good Luck