Thinkpads Forum

Hi all. I'm a new member here with some questions about an ancient Thinkpad 360cse with a 486 I just picked up. I did some searching on the forum but couldn't find much addressing my specific questions so I apologize in advance if this is redundant.

First off, the 344mb hdd it came with is toast, so I'd like to put a cf card in it with an ide to cf adapter. Does anyone know what the maximum hdd size that the bios will recognize is? I read here somewhere that it might have been 1.4 or so gb but I believe that was a different model.

Seccondly, Are display ribbon cables known to fail in these? I get intermittent lines up half the screen when a color other than black or white is displayed.

And lastly, Has anyone tried repacking Thinkpad NiMH batteries with new cells? Is it possible? Or are they too fragile and hard to get into the case without destroying it?

I was thinking of attempting to install warypuppy linux and open office or Abiword on the cf card and using it primarely as a writing machine since I'm very easily distracted by the presence of a web browser. The mem test on bootup claims the machine has 20mb of ram so I don't see a reason why warypuppy wouldn't work, but if it doesn't, then I'd perhaps try dam small linux. Actually based on some more reading here Basic Linux sounds like a sound option. My last choice would be to just install the first revision of windows 95 and microsoft office suite. Would rather do linux though since I run it on my workhorse X61s. Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

Hi Hyena and welcome to the forum!
I have 360CSE and many other 360 models and yes, you can put 20 GIG Hdd in them. As for the screen, it looks like inverter/ribbon problem. My another 360CS has it, but external monitor is a remedy. Or you have to find another machine and transplant it yourself.
Battery must be doable but honestly, it is not worth it in my opinion, unless you do it for collecting purposes.
Hope this helps

Thanks for the info Khipata. Wow 20 Gb is huge for a 486 machine! I remember when I thought 1 Gb was something to brag about in a desktop! Shame about the display, at least it's usable still. Guess I'll see how annoying it gets once I actually get a gui to run on it.

I also found some more info on batteries probing around the forums and think perhaps I'll try "jump starting" it first before I tear into it. If that fails, which I expect it will, and new cells are too expensive for my liking I suppose I can just live with keeping it plugged in.

I remember back in the '80s when I spent nearly $700 for an 80MB Seagate ST-4096 full-height 5.25" hard drive.
That's right: MB, not GB!
It was for my first home-made desktop with 386/25 CPU, which I was updating from a half-height 20MB Seagate ST-225.

Seagate ST-4096 is the top-left monster.

That is a huge (in physical size of course) desktop hard drive. I was an infant when that was all the go. Aside from the apple IIs I used at school, I didn't have any exposure to anything from the 80's because my dad didn't buy our first home computer until 1993 or 4. First one was some sort of compaq which I only remember looking at. It got returned to the store for some reason and was replaced with a gateway 2000. 486 with 8mb of ram and a 512mb hard drive. I still remember keeping a vigil for the UPS man and running to the door when I saw him coming up the driveway with two huge boxes adorned with cow spots. I still have the gateway broshure that came with it. Its funny to look through today!

Anyway, I tore a bit more into the 360 last night and discovered it indeed has a 16mb ram card. I also removed two more batteries next to the card. One button lithium cell and a pack of three NiCd button cells. One I would assume is a p-ram battery? But what is the other for?

Hi. Welcome to the forum and congrats on a nice find. I have two 360 units myself, one fully working and one I will install a new mobo in.

For the HDD, be aware that you need to bend pin 2 on the drive connector if you use bigger drives than the 344 and 800-something MB drives that they came with. One of my units got a 1.4GB drive upgrade back in the days, but pin 2 was bent on this one. I have also successfully used a 2.1GB drive in it, still with the bent pin, but I'm not sure how far you can go before you get a problem. 20GB sounds a little much, but I can be wrong.

I opened up one of my main batteries a while ago, and a rebuild seems pretty straight forward. No intelligence, just NiMH cells and cables. But after pricing the cells on eBay, I realized that this would cost me almost $100, so I skipped it. The laptop is after all only used a couple of times a year.

The other batteries are CMOS battery and a so called standby battery. The standby battery (Green one) has AFAIK the purpose of keeping the system "alive" if the laptop is put to sleep and the main battery is taken out and swapped. It's rechargeable, and you have a certain time window for doing this swap. So not really useful these days. Particularly in 701C machines the standby battery is known to leak and cause havoc, so I usually remove these standby batteries.

Those NiMH cells are quite expensive, I looked into it for my 755C a while back and it was around $100, far too much for what amounts to a toy these days. I'd highly recommend keeping the battery out of the system, my 755CX's battery leaked and caused some corrosion, as well as essentially gluing the battery in, before it was given to me.

Thanks for the info guys. I am currently trying to exercize the battery back to life. After attaching a similar 9.6 volt battery to it and charging a couple of times I am only up to 2 volts. It's increasing each time but I'm not holding out much hope. Since the origional cells are so expensive has anyone thought to put some cheaper, lower amp hour rated cells in? Digikey has a 9.6 volt pack that would fit inside the pack's profile giving something in the neighborhood of 2ish amp hours for around 36 bucks. It's at least a full amp hour less than what the origional pack had, but presumably you could still get maybe 30 minutes? What was the origional run time of these machines on the battery?

I just happened to find Dos 6.1 and windows 3.1 on floppies in the basement at work so I decided to go ahead and install that on my CF card. 3.1 is apparently what was origionally on the machine. I could not for the life of me get the CF to IDE adapter that I bought to work so I abandoned that and simply ran the drive through a PCMCIA adapter which worked great! Only annoyance is having to boot into the bios each time to change the drive order. I think I fixed this though by jumping the lithium cmos battery back to life and re-instaling it. As I feared there is just no hope for the main battery. I was also very pleased to find microsoft word 3 was avaliable free online. I had to install it by dumping the ISO on the CF card from another computer and then running the exe off the CF in the 360. There are some bugs, like the fonts didn't install for some reason, but otherwise everything works. I might still attempt a linux install but I think it will have to be basiclinux running in DOS. I got the CF to begin to boot Warypuppy but as soon as the boot process began accesing the system ram it would crash and go into an infinite boot loop.

I'm very confounded that you could boot CF via PCMCIA adapter on yours, yet I do have that in my bios to boot that way in 600E and 600 but they did not boot.

How did you prepare your CF to boot?

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

What are you trying to boot? Puppylinux started to boot but failed due to what I can only assume was a lack of ram. I gave up on linux for now for that reason. As for dos, I partitioned a lexar 256mb card as fat16 from gparted running off my x61 linux thinkpad. I then set the 360's bios boot order to floppy first then pcmcia. Rebooted with pc dos 6.1 disk 1 in the drive and installed it to C: It installed to the cf card just fine, however after the install I could not get it to boot. As it turned out, install had not loaded sys.com for some reason, so I booted from the dos floppy again, typed sys c: which loaded the program and away it went!

The main point is (I assume that's what Thinkpadcollection also meant) is that we're surprised that the 360 could boot from PCMCIA. The newer ones, like 600 and 560 doesn't do that. But I have never tried it with any of my 360 units. Just using a CF card would sure make experimenting with Linux distros a lot easier rather than dealing with something in the HDD bay and the ribbon cable every time you need to do something. In the 360 there is after all no way to load an OS from anything except floppies. So if you had you 360 finally boot from PCMCIA, that's good news.

Oh I see. I was somewhat surprised myself when, after failing to get my cheap Chinese IDE to CF adapter in the HDD bay to work, that it booted from the PC card slot adapter. I didn't even expect to find the option to boot from it in the BIOS. That's why I bought the IDE adapter in the first place. Still rather perplexed why that thing didn't work, but it's moot at this point. I'm indeed surprised the 5xx and 6xx series machines can't boot from pcmcia if the 360 can. It is definitely a nice feature to be able to pop the booting drive out with the touch of a button and pop it in my modern Thinkpad to dump downloaded software on.

I also have one more question. I need some drivers, namely a sound driver for the thing. Does anyone know where I can find legacy drivers this old? I know there's a link to a mirror in a thread here, but the link doesn't seem to work.

Hyena wrote:I need some drivers, namely a sound driver for the thing. Does anyone know where I can find legacy drivers this old? I know there's a link to a mirror in a thread here, but the link doesn't seem to work.

I've updated the first post in the mirror thread so it is easier to find the latest working link to the mirror. Here is a direct link for you:
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/ft ... rg/pccbbs/

To figure out which file(s) you need for your 360, you will want to download the "allfiles.txt" list, and then you can search for references to 360. There may be more than one version of any particular utility that is compatible with your machine. One possible audio driver for a 360 running Windows 3.1 to try would be:
"aftps140.exe" (Audio Disk (v1.40) For DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and OS/2 Warp: ThinkPad 360,750,755C/Cs)

And like most files related to Thinkpads, you can find it inside the "mobiles" subdirectory:
...pccbbs/mobiles

Phil.

Thank you Pkiff for the info on the drivers. After reading the readme files for the sound card driver, I strongly suspect that my 360 doesn't even have the ability to play sound other than the various beeps and boops controlled by the bios. I guess there was a sound module that one could install after market. I don't know if it has it or not, so I decided to hold off on installing any sound drivers. I did, however install the thinkpad utilities found on the server including such things as the battery monitor, which is worthless to me, but looks cool. LOL

I also tried to get the DOS command prompt version of Basiclinux to run. After booting DOS without Autoexec.bat and Config.sys I was able to run it in it's command prompt form, but the Xwindows GUI just boots to a black screen. I either don't have enough ram, the provided linux video drivers don't cut it, or maybe I just need to plug in an external mouse, which I don't currently have. Either way, it was fun refreshing myself on all the obsolete DOS commands I had all but forgotten.

Google Shopping has some batteries available new for the 360 series: https://www.google.com/#q=thinkpad+360c ... y&tbm=shop

RE: audio, the 300-series ThinkPads did not get this capability until the 365 was introduced. Some had it included on the laptop itself (365CD, 365CSD), while the 365C and 365CS did not. However, you could use the audio line in available on the replicator for those two models.

Remember that in the early 90's, the ThinkPad 700 series already was state of the art luxury (700, 701, 710, 720, 730, 750, 755, 760) while the 300 was the budget line. The 755 from the year before came with a CD well before the 300 series received one.

Great historical info if you're interested: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_History

Hmm.. I could not get the battery link to work, and a similar google search came up with nothing. I am on my phone though which could be limiting me.

I should have known about the sound capability since the unit had no line jacks. Thanks for the further information!

RealBlackStuff wrote:I remember back in the '80s when I spent nearly $700 for an 80MB Seagate ST-4096 full-height 5.25" hard drive.
That's right: MB, not GB!
It was for my first home-made desktop with 386/25 CPU, which I was updating from a half-height 20MB Seagate ST-225.

UGH. Most of those ST-4096 drives were crap. I had one back in the 90s in a PS/2 Model 60 I bought secondhand. When the drive was accessed, the whole machine shook.

That looks like an ST-251 in the top right. Those weren't the fastest drives (stepper motor, instead of the voice coil in the 4096), but they were fairly reliable. I have a few of those here, and just tested a few hundred various MFM drives for an e-waste recycler in CA (they want to sell them).

Hyena wrote:Hi all. I'm a new member here with some questions about an ancient Thinkpad 360cse with a 486 I just picked up. I did some searching on the forum but couldn't find much addressing my specific questions so I apologize in advance if this is redundant.

I'm going to skip responses and just respond directly to you, only because I was just playing with a 360CSE earlier tonight, and I'm in the processing of finishing up a Debian 2.2 install on my 360CE.

First off, the 344mb hdd it came with is toast, so I'd like to put a cf card in it with an ide to cf adapter. Does anyone know what the maximum hdd size that the bios will recognize is? I read here somewhere that it might have been 1.4 or so gb but I believe that was a different model.

I feel your pain. Mine had a drive password on it, and from what research I did, the Travelstar DHAA was really the first 2.5" drive to have a password option. As such, chances are probably next to nil on clearing it.

I'd skip the CF adapter. You can use it, but the biggest drive it'll work with is 512MB. If you want to go that route, I've had good luck with Cisco 512MB cards (since they're meant for industrial duty, aka more write cycles I'd think).
If you want something a bit bigger/faster, I'd go this route:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SIMPLETECH-STEC ... Sw4shX9cF0

I just picked up 3 of these and obviously, they're pretty cheap. I had to remove the master/slave pins on the drive to get it to pass POST, otherwise you'll get a 174 error. I also have some 2GB drives on order from China (WD SiliconDrive). I ordered one before to test it before ordering more, and it worked beautifully. DOS 6.22 and OS/2 Warp 4. Ordered 5 more for my other ThinkPads and my PS/2 Mod 77.

Seccondly, Are display ribbon cables known to fail in these? I get intermittent lines up half the screen when a color other than black or white is displayed.

Sometimes. They can only handle so much bending. I'll probably be keeping my 360CSE, but I might have a 360CE parts unit I'd be willing to sell fairly cheap. I don't believe the cables are the same, although I could be wrong.

And lastly, Has anyone tried repacking Thinkpad NiMH batteries with new cells? Is it possible? Or are they too fragile and hard to get into the case without destroying it?

I'm thinking of posting a new thread on this, as I'm fixing to do this myself and order a spot welder from ebay. The 360 battery pack is pretty easy - 18 cells, 4/5A size of NiMH. Apparently, you can get Sanyo equivalents and they're about $4.25 apiece. I used to work for a battery rebuilding company in Southern California almost a decade ago, so I have some experience doing this. The battery on the 360 is pretty easy. Solder 3 points and build the pack. No circuitry. The 750/755 might be a bit more difficult (it has intelligent circuitry and leaking batteries are a problem).

I was thinking of attempting to install warypuppy linux and open office or Abiword on the cf card and using it primarely as a writing machine since I'm very easily distracted by the presence of a web browser. The mem test on bootup claims the machine has 20mb of ram so I don't see a reason why warypuppy wouldn't work, but if it doesn't, then I'd perhaps try dam small linux. Actually based on some more reading here Basic Linux sounds like a sound option. My last choice would be to just install the first revision of windows 95 and microsoft office suite. Would rather do linux though since I run it on my workhorse X61s. Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

Your OS possibilities are really endless. BSD, Linux, OS/2, Windows NT, 95/98, etc. The most that machine will go up to is 36MB RAM (32MB card under the floppy, your machine sounds like it has a 16MB card right now).