Thinkpads Forum

I have a thinkpad 600 2645-51A. I had the standard 3gig harddrive. Have just purchased a s/h 30gig travelstar, updated to the latest bios, installed the HD but it only shows as 9gig in ME fdisk or partition magic . I contacted IBM uk support who stated that the 600 can only support 20gig. Has anybody had a similar problem and know how I can get the machine to see at least 20 gig?

I have the 2645-45U (also a 600), and I just installed a 60GB drive last weekend, and have no problem recognizing it. I'm not the only one - a number of people have installed drives larger than 20GB without issue.

You said you updated to latest BIOS - you do mean IBET54WW, right? I'm running that one, and if my machine recognizes the 60GB, your should recognize the 20GB.

Have you spoken to the manufacturer of the drive or the vendor from whom you bought it about this? Perhaps they have seen this before and have a "canned fix" for it...

Rob

My bios is IBET54WW the drive is manufactured by IBM. How can I check the drive size in the thinkpad bios? The size is shown in ME fdisk as 95--

It sounds to me like the PARTITION is 9GB, not the drive.

Does fdisk show any unused space on the drive? Is ME's fdisk different than W98's?

Thanks. When you use Fdisk it will only partition to 9GB which it says is the full size. I think Win98 and ME fdisk are the same

If Fdisk is only showing 9Gigs then it could mean that they sent you a 9Gig HDD and not a 30Gig, or Fdisk isn't reading things correctly, or you have a defective HDD, or you're not using Fdisk correctly. I am using a 40gig in a 600 series TP with no problem. When you Fdisk, destroy all the partitions and start over by creating a new active partition and then formatting...make sure and use the largest capacity (FAT32). See if you now have a bigger partition. Sometimes Fdisk can be finicky. I know that typically on large drives, all of the single partition isn't displayed but once you start loading Windows it's there...a strange thing. This is especially true if you partition and as FAT32 and then convert to NTFS...I don't know why.

Anyway, good luck!

An after thought....why in the world would a IBM service rep. say that the 600 series can only see a 20Gig partition when you have a 9gig on your 30Gig drive...makes no sense...if what he was saying was true, then he should have made suggestions for you to at least see 20gigs of the 30gig drive....how odd.

It just occurred to me that the drive may be set to limit the cylinders to 1024. Some machines have problems with large drives, so you can turn on that artificial limit. It is usually set with a jumper, but it could be set with software as well.

I know Hitachi/IBM drives CAN be set to limit to just about any size you like. They will lie to the BIOS all day. Get your drive maker's diagnostic software and see if there's a limit set and clear it if so.