Thinkpads Forum

Hey,

I bought a 755CE in a pretty good condition off of eBay and everything works except the HDD has a password on it. The seller can`t of course remember it. It is the original 510MB one.

I then bought an IBM DVAA 2810, the 810 MB version. Unfortunately this one won`t even spin up when connected. The seller swears it is in working condition. I have no other equiptment to verify this.

I currently use MS-DOS 6.2 off of floppies, but in the long run this is not a viable option for me.

Is there anything I can do to make the DVAA work?

Can I use a CF in the PCMCIA slot and use that as a HDD? Or put in a PATA/CF instead of the HDD.

I know there is a lot of information out there but none specific for the 755.

Thanks.
Lars

Came the new drive in a own caddy or did you used the old caddy?

I have no experience with the 755s, neither have I ever owned one. So just some general suggestions for you: If you work with hard drives regularly, an IDE/SATA to USB adapter is a cheap and very useful tool. http://www.ebay.com/itm/SATA-IDE-Drive- ... 5d53034ee9 This way you can test drives independent from other hardware and isolate faults related to the hard drive itself. In this case, I strongly suspect that you got a dead hard drive, and that it either died during shipping, or that the seller is lying to you. Hard to prove either way, though. I assume you have tried it in a caddy with a known working flex cable?

I have never tried a CF to IDE adapter in any pre-600 laptop myself, but it's worth a try. It's a safer bet than CF card in the PCMCIA slot, as I really don't know if any Thinkpad, particularly not from that era, would actually boot from the PCMCIA slot.