Thinkpads Forum

Praise the IBM gods, an S31 came to the recycler and is sort of in rough shape.
Luckily it just has a scratched lid, dead battery, line of dead pixels and missing the caddy and connector for the HDD.

Unless there is a way of tapping into one of the ports to boot from, I don't think a ThinkPad of this time would support booting from a Linux live session USB.

I haven't really looked much into it other then eBay, ThinkPad-parts and a few sites from Google's first page.
Might be impossible to get unless I buy another unit, which wouldnt make the project so fun.

FWIW there is no caddy.   instead, there's a shield that slides over top of the HDD after it has been set in place.   the drive goes in at an angle on two of the right-hand posts, then drops in place and plugs into the planar via the HDD cable.

for the cable, a copy might be your best bet at this point.   here is one example: http://www.pchub.com/uph/laptop/588-428 ... Cable.html

Thank you very much Erik!

A nice S31 you've got
Let me know when you are bored of it XD