Thinkpads Forum

What kind of magic is required to use a hard drive in my 770E, Win98, ultrabay?

I acquired the adapters and a new TravelStar. I put it in place of the CDR, but the TP is oblivious to its presence.

What am I stuck with and how do I identify it?

Has the drive been partitioned and formatted?

After the disk has been partitioned and formatted, Windows will see the drive.

Try the following procedure for using fdisk and format. Look about halfway down the page to "How to Repartition and Format a Slave Hard Disk". Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 255867

GomJabbar wrote:Has the drive been partitioned and formatted?

After the disk has been partitioned and formatted, Windows will see the drive.

Try the following procedure for using fdisk and format. Look about halfway down the page to "How to Repartition and Format a Slave Hard Disk". Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 255867

1. You have to see the drive to partition and format it. I thought my message noted that nmothing sees it.

2. The slave instructions talk about jumpers. Regular hard drives to the best of my knowledge.

You may have a perfectly fine, brand new hard drive, correctly attached to your ThinkPad and not be able to "see" it in Windows 98. In order to "see" it in Windows 98, you need to partition it first. This is normally done under DOS for a Windows 98 computer.

Have you tried to run "fdisk" in DOS mode to see if the drive is recognized through the fdisk DOS command? I think you can probably just fdisk from right within Windows, but you won't be able to do it from within Windows File Explorer, you'll have to open up a DOS box...or you might be able to type in fdisk at Start -> Run -> fdisk, I'm not sure.

If you are not familiar with fdisk, then be careful that you choose the right drive and don't accidentally wipe out your current main hard drive. You're first step in fdisk should be to change or select the drive you want to work with from within the fdisk dialog pages. The instructions GomJabbar points to above are basically correct. You can ignore the jumpers business if you are working with a new Travelstar drive -- whatever jumper configuration they shipped with should work correctly in your ThinkPad.

If fdisk is old hat for you, then you have a connection problem or an IRQ problem.

Phil.