R32 HD replacement

[CharlesF]

Does anyone know if I can replace a dead R32 HD with a 60G Seagate ATA 5400 rpm HD.

Alternatively, does anyone know what the largest drive supported by the R32 is?
Are replacements restricted to certain vendors? Seagate's documentation for the ST96812A 60G ATA drive suggests that Thinkpads are supported.

Thanks.

[tfflivemb2]

As long as it is a 2.5" PATA drive (9mm thick), you can use virtually any drive that you might wish. I believe that the current limit is 160GB, until the 200GB drives come out later this year.

[CharlesF]

As long as it is a 2.5" PATA drive (9mm thick), you can use virtually any drive that you might wish. I believe that the current limit is 160GB, until the 200GB drives come out later this year.

Thanks for the reply. I installed the Seagate replacement in the R32 last night. Partition Magic could not see the drive.

I'll test the Seagate in an external case and check if I can see the drive on my TP Z60.

[lparsons]

Sounds like the same problem I had installing an 80gb drive into my R32. Turns out the problem is neither the drive, nor its capacity.

The problem (and I didn't believe it myself when I first heard it) is that the thinkpad R32 will not recognize a drive until it is partitioned.

I know, this is easily one of the most idiotic things I have ever heard or said. I suspect IBM did this just to get people to pay their exorbitant drive prices.

The workaround is cumbersome, but obvious. Partition the drive on a different system first, and then put it into your R32 and install your OS. You don't even need to partition it the way you want the first time, since you can go ahead and repartition during your OS install. But if you have a hard drive in with no partitions, the R32 won't allow anything on the IDE bus (including, of course, the CD-ROM) to boot or really do anything.

good luck

As long as it is a 2.5" PATA drive (9mm thick), you can use virtually any drive that you might wish. I believe that the current limit is 160GB, until the 200GB drives come out later this year.

Thanks for the reply. I installed the Seagate replacement in the R32 last night. Partition Magic could not see the drive.

I'll test the Seagate in an external case and check if I can see the drive on my TP Z60.

[CharlesF]

Sounds like the same problem I had installing an 80gb drive into my R32. Turns out the problem is neither the drive, nor its capacity.

The problem (and I didn't believe it myself when I first heard it) is that the thinkpad R32 will not recognize a drive until it is partitioned.

I know, this is easily one of the most idiotic things I have ever heard or said. I suspect IBM did this just to get people to pay their exorbitant drive prices.

The workaround is cumbersome, but obvious. Partition the drive on a different system first, and then put it into your R32 and install your OS. You don't even need to partition it the way you want the first time, since you can go ahead and repartition during your OS install. But if you have a hard drive in with no partitions, the R32 won't allow anything on the IDE bus (including, of course, the CD-ROM) to boot or really do anything.

good luck

It does sound too idiotic to be true but I wouldn't put anything past IBM. I did replace a bad drive in a R40 with one I got from IBM (warranty replacement). I had no problems but it may very well have already been partitioned.

I'll try partitioning the drive and see what happens. However, I think my problem may be a little more complicated because it looks like the Seagate drive doesn't sit as far down as the original Travelstar.

It looks like there are some " extra" plastics stops on the connector end of the Seagate which are not on the Travelstar whcih may be stopping the pins from being inserted.

[lparsons]

I bought a hitachi drive for mine, since that is the brand that IBM uses and I figured it would be the most likely to be compatible "just in case".

I actually ended up putting the drive into a 2.5" USB caddy, and hooking it up to my windoze desktop, where I then put a 2gb (unformatted, but bootable!) FAT32 partition on the drive. I then put the drive into my R32, and was able to boot the winXP install CD that I made (from instructions elsewhere on this forum). I then proceeded to wipe out the 2gb partition, make a larger NTFS partition to install XP onto, followed by a FAT32 partition to exchange files between XP and FreeBSD, and then installed XP with about 30gb of wiggle room at the end of the drive to install FreeBSD onto.

Now life is peachy and my R32 happily dual-boots. And I have an 80gb hard drive where once I had a 30gb

[CharlesF]

I'm all sorted. Looks like the Seagate replacement is ever-so-slightly larger. I had to jiggle the drive a bit to have it lock into the pins.

I've restored by backup Deploy Centre image and everyhing is peachy.

Btw, I did try to source a Hitachi but could not get a straight answer on when the drive I wanted would be available.

[lparsons]

Aha. I had to look up deploy centre, as I hadn't heard of it. I'll try real hard to not make this into an OS war, but I frankly tend to push people when buying a new HD to use that as a chance to reinstall their OS from scratch rather than carry old OS stuff on to the new drive. But thats philosophical in nature, really.

Glad to hear you got it all running. I'd say I'm pretty happy with my R32, all things considered... Its at least 3 years old already now and still chugging along nicely. Where did you buy your drive from? I don't even remember off the top of my head where I got my hitachi drive from. It might have even been a brick&mortar purchase, since the hitachi drives are sold at a couple of retailers now.

I just feel bad for the first online store I bought a HD for my R32 from. I didn't know about IBM's odd little HD game, and returned to them a perfectly good 80gb toshiba drive because I didn't know what I had to do. Oh well.