Thinkpad 760 large harddrive problem

[TiTaN_pi8]

I have modded a 20gig harddrive to work in a TP 760. It is recognized just fine but the notebook won't boot it.

I have installed 'Smart Boot Manager' on the disk from another pc (with a notebook drive adaptor cable) and that pc will boot from the disk just fine.
The thinkpad just sits there with a blinking _ in the upper left corner of the screen when the bootscreen should show.

In the past I have done the same operations on a 0.5gig drive and back then it worked.

I have partioned the first partion of the 20gig drive to be 2gigs, could that be the problem? Or am I doing something else wrong?


Thanks a lot!

[TiTaN_pi8]

I have found the problem: the hard drive is to big.

The bios will not boot of these large drives. I have limited the capacity to 1 GB and now it works!

I have also tried 8GB --> doesn't work
6,2GB --> doesn't work

I am now trying 2GB, I hope that works.

And I also hope that linux will be able to see past this limitation and will be able to use the full 20GB.

Can anybody tell me the max harddrive capacity that this BIOS will boot from?
I read 6,4GB, but apparantly this is not correct (6,2 doesn't work).

[whizkid]

I recently got a 750P running with a 12GB drive. It turned out the drive wasn't too big. It was configured as the slave drive.

Download and run Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT). It will detect and test master and slave drives. If the drive shows up as the slave, you will need to force it to the other channel.

I did that by bending a pin on the drive so the pins are always open, forcing the drive to be Master. The very early ThinkPads (and all laptops, I think) used the opposite drive channel polarity. Neat. My 750P came with a 170MB(!) drive, and I had upgraded to a Fujitsu 2GB drive with no problem, but the newer 12GB drive needed the modification.

Your first partition should be able to go up to 8GB, which the BIOS will see, so the OS (or its loader if using Linux) has to go there. Once the OS loads, it will use the whole drive, so you can make the rest of the drive one partition.

If you are trying to use DOS, partitions are limited to 2GB size and FAT16, and all DOS partitions must be below the 8GB limit.

Which OS are you going to use?

[TiTaN_pi8]

I have already bend the pins so the drive is recognized (as master).

I have tried several capacities and the biggest one that works so far is 2GB...

I use linux so that won't be a problem.

If the drive is to big, the thinkpad just won't boot it, it will just sit there with a blinking _ in the top left of the screen.

[whizkid]

Linux? Great! (I should have read more carefully.)

You should make a /boot partition, it should be the first partition on the drive, and it should be small. Fedora Core 4 recommends 75MB, and that's a big Linux.

The partition holding the kernel must entirely be below the 8GB limit (because the kernel file can be anywhere on that partition), so that's why I put mine first. I think mine is 100MB. (Then I have a 2GB FAT partition for FreeDOS.) Then I have a small swap partition, then one big root partition of about 9GB. Debian runs just fine, except for X and sound!

Make sure you have the latest BIOS for your machine. IBM recently put up the BIOS files for our old machines, so make sure yours is up to date.

If that's all old news to you, and things still don't work, let me know how the rest of your drive is partitioned. And if you've partitioned the drive in another machine, stop that.

[TiTaN_pi8]

I have indeed done this. I made a small /boot partition so that linux can be booted and it works great.

But I still can't make the drive any bigger...

I do not have the latest bios installed, I tried to install it, but I need a floppy drive and I do not have one. So I copied the files fromt the floppy to the harddrive but it was no good, I couldn't update the bios.

Any info on how to do that? I already read a thread on this forum telling me how to flash without a battery but that method doesn't work for me. The filenames are different too...

Thx a lot for the replies.

[whizkid]

I recommend getting a floppy drive. They can be nice to have for such old machines.

Other than that, you can make a bootable CD, if the 760' supports that. If not, I cannot help you. Maybe others can... I cannot take the time to examine the floppy, look at the scripts and give you the command line. Maybe you can do that yourself.

If you have a small boot partition, how is the rest of your drive partitioned? Your partition table from fdisk might be very helpful. I can post mine tonight if you would like.

[TiTaN_pi8]

I have made a bootable cd, but the bios won't install. I think it needs to write to it, so I copied everything to the harddrive. But, as I said, even then it doesn't work . Maybe I can get a floppy drive...