Thinkpads Forum

Hi folks

Can one boot a thinkpad from an ultrabay hard disk?

I'm sorta having this crazy idea of booting a thinkpad from a compact flash card installed in an ultrabay.

Then, one could even have 2 ultrabays: one for booting a compact flash, another one for booting a hard drive.

That way one could even remove the main hard drive from the thinkpad, so that it would run on 100% compact flash when needed - pretty cool hey? suppose battery life would really appreciate that

Could anyone help me out on this one?

Yes, thinkpad can boot from the ultrabay. And according to the bios, they can boot from external USB HDDs as well!

Do you know if they can boot from the ultrabay with the main drive removed?

Yep, I installed Vista that way, using an external USB DVD drive. I had the main XP hard drive removed so that Vista would not put a boot manager on it. Of course during the install, Vista had to reboot.

wow wicked!

sounds like one can do a great amount of playing with these machines then!

can they do RAID 0 too then?

software RAID 0 maybe... I wouldn't recommend it however.

of course i was an idiot as i really meant raid 1 not 0...

does the mobo of the thinkpad support that? i think i saw an ad once on ebay for a t60p that costed over 6000€ which did raid 1...

[censored] if a lappy could run raid that would be nice.....hmmmmm i'mm gonna read on that.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/IBM-Thinkpad-T60p ... dZViewItem

found the listing i mentioned ^^

i couldn't find out if it is *really* doing raid 1 on that setup though.
another weird thing, i didn't know 160GB hdd existed in 7200rpm...

hmmm, verry interesting...i cant read german, but looks like it has a mpci raid controller or something.

thanx for posting this

no worries mate, my pleasure...

anyway, if it does, then that must be a standard feature on every t60 thinkpad, right? i don't see how the ebay seller got a contract with lenovo to brand special mobo's for his 6000€ tpad

I saw another article discussing the Raid 0 installation on a MacBook Pro. It is a commercial drop-in solution.

check this:

http://echeng.com/journal/2007/04/26/32 ... cbook-pro/

Since the T60 has the ultrabay and probably the same Intel chip set as the T60 I assume there must be solution to install a hardware Raid 0 on Thinkpads as well, if there were a option in the BIOS... ? javascript:emoticon(':roll:')
Rolling Eyes

Imagine 2x200Gb 7200rpm drives on a widescreen T61/T61 and you have the perfect workstation.

Can somebody running an OS from the ultrabay share with us whether it will be (significantly) slower to run an OS off the ultrabay hard drive?

milstein wrote:Can somebody running an OS from the ultrabay share with us whether it will be (significantly) slower to run an OS off the ultrabay hard drive?

I haven't noticed any issues. The performance score for my hard drive under Vista was quite good, and this is with Vista on the hard drive in the Ultabay Slim 2nd hard drive adapter.

kamaleon wrote:Hi folks

Can one boot a thinkpad from an ultrabay hard disk?

I'm sorta having this crazy idea of booting a thinkpad from a compact flash card installed in an ultrabay.

Then, one could even have 2 ultrabays: one for booting a compact flash, another one for booting a hard drive.

That way one could even remove the main hard drive from the thinkpad, so that it would run on 100% compact flash when needed - pretty cool hey? suppose battery life would really appreciate that

Could anyone help me out on this one?

Need to sort out a few things.

The CARDBUS is different than the Ultrabay. The Cardbus on the T60 is below the left palmrest, and that is where you can use Compact Flash via a Cardbus 32 Adapter. I am not sure if you can boot off the Cardbus. (although you can choose a USB flash drive as a boot device so I it seems very possible to boot off the Cardbus)

The Ultrabay is on the right side of the T60 and AFAIK there are no compact flash adapters for the Ultrabay. But you can get the HDD adapter for the Ultrabay and install a bootable OS onto it. That's what most people have said so far.

Several companies make CF-IDE adapters - so you could get the PATA Ultrabay slim adapter, put in the CF-IDE adapter, and CF card(s) in that - and boot from it. No reason why it shouldn't work.

Clay

I think it might depend on the CF-IDE adapter, but recently I installed XP on a Kingston 50X 2 GB CF card just to see how it works and it was really really really slow.

Transfer rates will be slow compared to a hard drive, but random access will be extremely quick. If you were to boot off of one - boot times should be quicker for example. 50X is actually a slow card these days.

Clay

FRiC wrote:I think it might depend on the CF-IDE adapter, but recently I installed XP on a Kingston 50X 2 GB CF card just to see how it works and it was really really really slow.

I don't think flash SSD's are ready for prime time in terms of booting a full OS off of them. From what I've read, the sequential read rates are abyssmal when compared to the 30-40 MB/s you get with internal HD's. Flash disks have been seen with half of this speed for reads and a tenth of this for writes. Unless you're really concerned about battery life (Which may be negated by the slow read speeds) or reliability (Which generally isn't a problem with APS), SSD's seem to be better suited as a quick cache for your paging file or Vista Readyboost. If they can make a Robson-style expresscard solution to add an extra level of cache, then I will be more than happy to purchase one of those.

Oh yeah, also I'm currently dual booting ubuntu and Vista on two separate drives, one in the ultrabay and one on the main SATA HDD right now and also have booted off a Live-USB copy of linux as well, so lenovo provides all sorts of options for booting.