Thinkpads Forum

Managed to get a hold of a 560 in pretty good nick. Idiot that I am, I dropped a bag of groceries on it an cracked the top cover. Either way, works fine and runs fine. Installing Win 98 onto a CF card atm.

This thing doesn't have any drives whatsoever, no usb, nowt. Was gonna install D@mn Small Linux but that fell head first off a skyscraper once I saw the serious lack of USB ports... I suppose it could take over as a CNC mill control unit (running another TP atm) but aside from that I'm seeing no proper use for it. Battery seems to hold a charge though. And the ram is maxed out with 40 measly megabytes.

Sidenote: I also found the original owner online. Not difficult considering her name is engraved on the computer (Is that after market or was it offered by IBM?).

You still have PCMCIA slots, where you can plug in ethernet cards or wireless (802.11b) cards for networking, or CF card adapters for removable storage.
Or, if you don't use any of those modern accessories, you could keep a diary on it. Physical separation from networks and removable storage means data on it is pretty safe from hackers (who does not have physical access to your premises.)

True, word processing might still work. I do write a lot and the keyboard is extremely comfortable to write on. Safety isn't much of an issue since I'm extremely paranoid and encrypt everything but the grocery list.

I do have a lot of issues with it though. I yanked the original drive. One, it contains vital drivers. Two, even if I did crack the password, it still has personal data on it which is none of my business. Threw in a number of drives, most (8GB+) wont even POST, but now I managed to find a drive (6.4 GB) that did POST with the old windows 200 OS on it. But once I formatted and installed Windows 98 it gives me a Drive I/O error. Honestly, I'm stumped. This is the oldest Thinkpad I've worked on and I have no idea what I'm doing. At least they could've made a proper bios for it. Still, the GUI is pretty cool, considering they started doing that last year and they think its the best thing since Jesus.

Managed to get it running with the old drive (that just cuts out and spins down randomly) but i'm posting from the 560 right now. gonna keep it short, never know when the drive spins down. but yeah, it works. broswing via IE5 and a Xircom ethernet pc card.


Edit: seems it doesnt support drives over 4 gb. Hopefully it can take a 4 gb cf card once the cf-pata adapter arrives. None of my pcmcia cards fit aside from the xircom and a fax modem so no usb that way either. No wifi, both a 32 bit and neither fit.

Assuming it can take an older wifi card an an fat formatted 8gb cf as removable storage, this thing might even see some work.


Also, it has a colorful history. Found some confidential data on it so i grabbed an old phone, an unregistered sim card and contacted the first owner. This computer was supposed to have been destroyed (not just the hdd, entire computer) in 1998. Apparenly one of the IT techs didnt do his job and well, stole it. Original owner wanted me to destroy the data but didnt care about the computer itself, so i did a few overwrite and format passes on it.

Edit2: also, the 560 is supposed to have a socketed cpu, should it not? Becuase i'm missing something here. Namely the cpu....

http://i452.photobucket.com/albums/qq24 ... 2d1b8f.jpg (194KB image)

Admin edit: Changed large inline image to link.

AFAIK only the 560Z has socketed processors. The parts listing on the 560 and 560E HMM mention planar boards with processors, but never planar boards without processors or processors by themselves.

As for HDD support you can try looking for an old version of Disk Manager that has the the Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). I think the Ultimate Boot CD has the correct version (Disk Manager [IBM] 9.61).

First you connect the HDD to a system that natively supports >8 GB drives, install boot the Disk Manager disk/CD then install the DDO on to that drive. Then return the HDD to the 560 and it will be recognized.

I remember doing this for a non-Thinkpad Pentium MMX 233 laptop, but the Thinkpad 760 series also had this issue and the solution is the same. I believe it will work for your 560 as well.