Thinkpads Forum

I have a Thinkpad 380XD Type:2635-FAU S/N:78-BKZY2 Mfg. Date 09/98
IBM site says I will hold a 8 GIG... I don't know what page, but I remember seeing that. Is there any way to get say a 20GB HArd Drive to work? What model Number/Brand would work in this machine? I don't know much about laptop, but i know desktpos, and I don't know if hard drive are sawpable in notebooks like desktops.

Thanks.
Jim

Note: 96MB Ram (Maxed)5GB Hard Drive, Windows XP Pro SP2 With XP-Lite installed. Runs smoth... Just low on hard drive space.

I had a 380XD, and successfully added a 20GB drive, with no issues. The machine was damaged in a housefire. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the model no. of the drive. Seems to me it was under the IBM "brand"

As I remember, I just made sure I had the latest bios updates, and there were no issues. For all I know, the limit stated may have been the larlges available when the machine was manufactured.

dont know if this is still actual...


i had to partition the drive inside the thinkpad, and the first (and only) partition for installing win2k had to be smaller than 8,4gb (mine is 8000mb = 7,81gb).
the rest of the drive is used by a second partition made out of win2k.

partitioning the drive outside the thinkpad or using a partition over 8,4gb resulted in not beeing able to boot.


btw: the 30gb drive is a 5400 rpm model, lightyears faster than the old 4gb 4000 rpm... really!

If I'm not mistaken, the Pentium II versions of the 380XD/385XD have 440BX chipsets which will support just about anything up to 100gb.

However, the more common Pentium MMX versions with the TX chipsets have a much lower limit.

I remember once having a Fujitsu 20gb hard drive in a 380ED (the predecessor to the 380XD) that I managed to make work through means of an OnTrack drive overlay diskette.

as i wrote:

the 430tx can manage bigger drives (should be up to 32gb), but they have to be partitioned in the particular thinkpad (because of access level lba or large...) and the first and only partition during installation has to have fewer than 1024 cyl. (= 8600mb in fdisk).

that's what i did with mine...

i don't like diskmanagers since the times of 540mb hdds...


btw: i'm going to put that hdd into a 560x i recently bought on ebay. having the same system specs it should work to port the whole system without changes...

i´ll post again then...

ok, back again...


the 560x came yesterday.

ripped the 30gb hdd out of the 380xd, tossed it in the 560x, let win2k recognize some new hardware (the pci-bus is slightly different, so the vga, the display and the ide are recognized as new hardware), reboot:

tata, system ported successfully.


conclusion: the i430tx is definitely able to manage big drives the way i wrote above... (even with the old i8et23ww bios of '97)


little cosmetics: updated the bios to the latest i8et33ww and had to reinstall the thinkpad config tool, so that the new thinkpad is shown correctly



btw: pretty nice machine, though... looks even flatter than the x24 (because of the high power battery lifting it up)