160GB ATA drive in A21m?

[Ianski]

Has anyone tried installing a 160GB drive in a Thinkpad A21m (or any A2xx machine from the same family)? If so, did it work? I'm planning to load either Linux or Win XP Pro SP2, so OS hard drive size limits aren't an issue. The original drive no longer contains the service partition so I'm not concerned about transfering the image over or anything like that - just starting from scratch with a new drive. The old 20GB is probably not much longer for this world. The BIOS has been upgraded to 1.09 - the last version, issued in 2003 - but the BIOS notes don't say anything about hard drive size limits.

I have a T60 with an 80GB drive I could pull, but I'd rather not meddle with that unless I have to, because it does still have its service partition and a working OS.

Thanks
Ian

[Brad]

The 160gb drive should work without issue as long as it is a PATA interface If you have an old XP version you may get only 137gb recognized. Your T60 uses a different drive interface (SATA) which is not compatible.

Brad

[Ianski]

Thanks for the quick response. It had never even occurred to me to check what kind of interface the newer T60 had! The drive is the older PATA type, so that's good news that it will work on the old A21m.

[Ianski]

I installed the 160GB drive last night and tried to install Ubuntu Linux from a CD... the Ubuntu 8.04 installer recognizes the disk as 160GB, but the installation failed - error message said something about the CD possibly being dirty/scratched, so I'll try again with a different CD later this week. But for the purposes of this question it looks like the machine does support large drives - as long as they're PATA.

[Ianski]

Definitely works. I downloaded XUbuntu 8.10 and made a fresh CD, it installed flawlessly and recognized the hard drive properly. It even recognized the D-Link PCMCIA wireless network card when I plugged that in. Nice to get a little more life out of a nearly 9-year-old computer, even if the battery only holds 15 minutes of charge.