Thinkpads Forum

I recently hauled out my ThinkPad 760XL/Dock I combination, and was very impressed. It runs DOS like it's 1985, and I forgot that I had set it up to multiboot DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT and even Windows 2000 (thank you, System Commander).

The 8GB hard drive is eventually going to die, and I would like to clone it to something solid state before it does. Does anyone have (and want to sell) a TP 760 hard drive carrier with an adapter that could hold some form of solid state drive that could be formatted to 8GB so that I could clone the drive (if I can remember how I last did it fifteen years ago).

I seem to remember that I had a program (maybe it's still here somewhere) that let me FDISK a 10GB hard disk so that it was within the 8GB limit recognized by the 760XL BIOS. Presumably I would have to do that again.

If anyone knows of a guide to all this kind of thing online, I'll be very glad to hear about it.

Don't want to be insulting, but there is a book "DOS for Dummies" which describes it all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Dummies
And websites such as: https://scs.senecac.on.ca/~albert.pang/ ... oscmd.html
And not to forget: http://www.computerhope.com/overview.htm
Have fun!

I should have been clear that I was asking about was not basic DOS commands like FDISK or COPY but these two specialized things:

(1) whatever specialized HDD setup utility could be used to change something in an >8GB disk so that the TP 760 BIOS would recognize it (because of the 8GB limit); it certainly wasn't FDISK, which I've been using since DOS 3.3 days, but something that went a lot deeper, I think provided by Western Digital. If FDISK could do this, I wouldn't be asking. (As I remember, you couldn't use FDISK on a >8GB drive in a TP 760 until you used this other utility to make some deep change in the disk structure.)

(2) which software was useful for cloning those drives (not XCOPY but something specialized like Ghost).

I must have used something like that, because I found a backup drive in the ThinkPad-branded briefcase I use for storing parts and disks (including an ISA ethernet adapter for the Dock I), but can't remember what it was.

For anyone mildly interested: here's a link to what I think is the largest repository of information on any single DOS program (WordPerfect); I've been maintaining it regularly for about fifteen years and use the ThinkPad 760 whenever I need to test something in real hardware-based DOS instead of a VM:

http://wpdos.org

OK, I found the answers to my own question: the answer to (1) up above is this:

The software for getting the hard disk to the right capacity was the Hitachi Feature Tool. I've got version 1.7. It has an option to change the capacity of the drive. I used it to reduce the capacity of a 12GB drive to 8GB so that the ThinkPad 760 BIOS would recognize the disk.

It has a "Change Capacity" option to lets you select various maximum sizes so that the disk can work with various BIOSes - the preset values are 128GB, 32GB, and 8GB. Full description here:

http://www.hgst.com/support/downloads/legacy-downloads

Is there any other tool like this out there that might work with non-Hitachi drives?

And the answer to (2) is PowerQuest Drive Image, which included a cloning feature that cloned partitions between physical disks on the same computer. There's a second-hard-disk adapter that can replace the floppy drive, and you can then clone between the two hard disks. I found a hard disk with OS/2 installed - this setup was higher-tech than I remembered it...

Funny, I have all those programs (incl. a few WP versions) you mentioned, only they are/were buried in a pile of floppy-boxes I haven't opened in years.
My wife used WP religiously until M$-Office 2003 came out.

Possible alternatives I found in my boxes:
Western Digital's Disk Manager 6.03C, combined with their EZ-Drive 9.06W.
(This was later replaced by Data Lifeguard for DOS: http://support.wd.com/product/download. ... 11&lang=en )

Power Quest's Partition Magic Pro from before Symantec bought it and effed it up royally.

RealBlackStuff wrote: Possible alternatives I found in my boxes:
Western Digital's Disk Manager 6.03C, combined with their EZ-Drive 9.06W.
(This was later replaced by Data Lifeguard for DOS: http://support.wd.com/product/download. ... 11&lang=en )

Power Quest's Partition Magic Pro from before Symantec bought it and effed it up royally.

DiskManager (originally by OnTrack, licensed by WD) is mostly a kind of advanced FDISK (I have it on a floppy that has read errors). It doesn't change the capacity of the drive the way the Hitachi utility does. I still haven't tried the Hitachi utility on a non-Hitachi drive.

Partition Magic Pro: Brings back memories, that one. For years, I used one of the programs that came with it to multiboot between DOS and Windows and OS/2. It's still there on drive D:\ accessible to whatever was drive C:\.

BTW: Now It Can Be Told: Back in the mid 1990s, PowerQuest prepared a new version of Partition Magic and sent me an advance copy to test for a PC Magazine review. The first thing it did was demolish the MBR on my disk and make it unbootable. I had backups, but PowerQuest was not happy that they had demolished the PCMag reviewer's system. They sent out an engineer with some amazing equipment that read the disk directly. He spent four nights in a hotel and four days in my office with his equipment, figuring out what went wrong. He was an extremely nice and friendly guy, and I felt very bad about the whole thing because he missed his daughter's birthday while he was here. I kept urging him to go home and come back later, but PowerQuest insisted he stay.

After four days of testing he figured out that the program had failed because I had once had an OS/2 partition on the disk (as drive E:) but had deleted all the OS/2 files without reformatting the partition - and the program didn't know how to handle the partition signature that was left behind. The end result was that PowerQuest destroyed a few thousand CDs that they had already printed and packaged - but hadn't shipped. They then fixed the program, and the shipping version got a well-deserved positive review in PC Magazine.

Assuming the 750/760 hard drive caddy can be opened and the internal IDE hard drive removed, you could simply use an 8GB CF card in a CF-to-44-pin-IDE adapter. Both should be easy to acquire on eBay.

As for drive cloning, I prefer CloneZilla for more modern imaging and cloning tasks, but I'm not sure whether it can handle more antiquated partition tricks and bootloaders. Still, Linux's dd is always good for a bit-perfect drive clone.

twistero wrote:Assuming the 750/760 hard drive caddy can be opened and the internal IDE hard drive removed, you could simply use an 8GB CF card in a CF-to-44-pin-IDE adapter. Both should be easy to acquire on eBay.

That's what I'm about to do, with one or two reservations: There was another thread here saying that on some models (the 76x wasn't specifically mentioned) a CF card wouldn't boot the machine because the BIOS recognized it as a removable drive, and the 76x series can't boot from anything but the floppy or the HDD. (It won't boot from a CD-ROM either.) I'm going to look again at that thread for further information about CF cards that are seen as hard disks.