Thinkpads Forum

I can't get the dock bay enabled WITH the device bay enabled. I can get one or the other but when the device bay is enable it doesn't see the HDD in the dock.
Is this possible or is it a restriction in the program and only available under win95 and the 770?

If your Dock III has the 760 drive inserts, you are SOL. If your dock III has the 770 drive inserts, you may need a drive in a 770 caddy and an Ultrabay adapter.

I have a Dock III and a 770 and have had problems trying to get either an IDE CD-ROM (via cable) or a spare drive seen. I just surrendered to the inevitable and use SCSI devices in the Dock III.

If you manage to solve the problem, by all means let the rest of us know!

Bruce Guttman wrote:I have a Dock III and a 770 and have had problems trying to get either an IDE CD-ROM (via cable) or a spare drive seen. I just surrendered to the inevitable and use SCSI devices in the Dock III.

I no longer have the Select-a-Dock III but I was able to make it recognize an IDE CD-RW drive. As I recall, you need the latest IBM configuration utility and then you have to spend some quality time juggling interrupts. Sorry I don't recall more details, but I know it can be done (with a 770.)

OK, Well, I know that the drive in the main bay has to be set to cable select - master and slave do not work in the dock.

My problem is that with the dock enabled the device bay in the laptop is disabled - IRQ conflict and it won't allow me to change it.
In this config, everything works in both machines UNLESS I want to use the Zip drive in the ultraslim bay on the laptop.
To use it I have to go in and disable the dock and to enable second IDE device in the device bay. Now it sees the ZIP drive but not the drives in the dock.

I have a cdrw in the main dock bay, a floppy and one hdd on the ultrabay tray. This is the tray that holds a floppy and 2 HDD from a 760.
I had them all working before but I don't remember how I did it or what OS I was using (if that makes a diferrence).

I am running win2k svc pk 4, itetww55 bios latest and last revision, and I assume the latest configuration program for the 600X

Where would I find a 770 ultrabay tray?

Thanks,

hehehe forgot to log in, evidently

OK, Well, I know that the drive in the main bay has to be set to cable select - master and slave do not work in the dock.

My problem is that with the dock enabled the device bay in the laptop is disabled - IRQ conflict and it won't allow me to change it.
In this config, everything works in both machines UNLESS I want to use the Zip drive in the ultraslim bay on the laptop.
To use it I have to go in and disable the dock and to enable second IDE device in the device bay. Now it sees the ZIP drive but not the drives in the dock.

I have a cdrw in the main dock bay, a floppy and one hdd on the ultrabay tray. This is the tray that holds a floppy and 2 HDD from a 760.
I had them all working before but I don't remember how I did it or what OS I was using (if that makes a diferrence).

I am running win2k svc pk 4, itetww55 bios latest and last revision, and I assume the latest configuration program for the 600X

Where would I find a 770 ultrabay tray?

Thanks,

[Edit: I didn't see your postings above until after I posted my response. I don't know anything about adding TWO devices in the single Ultrabay slot of the Dock III, so my comments below may not help solve that issue. They may help the other poster who had difficulty just getting a single IDE device set up properly though]

I've got a Dock III with a 600X and a second Dock III with a 770E. Both of them have IDE devices in the standard device bay on the right side of the Dock. And at various times I've also had a CD-drive and a second hard drive installed in the UltraBay slot on the left side, though now I pretty much use the UltraBay slot only for a floppy drive. I use Windoze 98SE on both machines, but all these various configurations should be possible with your 600X under Windoze 2000 I think.

- Make sure that you've got IDE devices in the dock enabled in your ThinkPad Configuration utililty (don't know if it is identical in 2000)

- If you play around with the IDE channels, you may end up with various incompatible setups. I have the 3rd IDE channel enabled in both my DockIII/ThinkPad configurations. I think the 2nd IDE channel is normally enabled by default as connected to the UltraSlimBay of the 600 or 770 itself. This is configured slightly differently in Windows 95/98/ME than in Windows 2000/XP I think (or at least, the devices show up differently in Device Manager I think), but in all cases it is also tied in to whether or not you have "hot/warm swapping" enabled on the UltraSlimBay of your ThinkPad. The UltraBay in the Dock itself is NEVER hot/warm swappable in any OS.

- Additional hard drives in particular are a bit awkward to enable in the exact right way I think, because each hard drive seems to demand its own IDE channel. If you want a second hard drive in the Dock to use the 2nd IDE channel, I think you have to disable hot/warm swapping. I have found it easiest to attach any hard drive in the Dock to the 3rd channel and to leave hot/warm swapping enabled, even if you aren't going to need it.

- You may run into problems with IRQs and PCI Steering when trying to enable multiple hard drives in your Dock III/ThinkPad config. In a default configuration, IRQ 11 is usually reserved for "PCI Steering", but when you want 3 IDE channels, you need IRQ 11 specifcally for one of the channels. You should be able to fix this through the ThinkPad Configuration program by assigning IRQ 9 or 10 or some other empty IRQ as your 1st IRQ reserved for PCI Steering and thereby release IRQ 11 to the system. For three hard drives, I think you need IRQs 11, 14, and 15 all devoted to various kinds of IDE Channels/IDE Bus Mastering Devices. For more info on this stuff, consult IBM Document MIGR-4LXPPU: SelectaDock drive controller IRQ assignments - ThinkPad 600, 770.

- I think you can also run into problems if you try to have a hard drive in both the Dock's IDE device bay and in the Dock's UltraBay at the same time. i.e. be careful about installing two hard drives in the Dock. You can have a second hard drive in the ThinkPad UltraSlimBay along with a hard drive in the IDE device bay of the Dock. However, I have found that in such a setup you should not enable DMA on any of your hard drives, as data transfer back and forth between the three drives can become unreliable. Indeed, I decided to disable DMA on all my hard drives on these systems, including especially ones in my Dock III. I have a variety of other devices which might have been causing this problem, though, including additional PCI graphic cards so the problem may not be general.

- Also (and this perhaps should justifiably lead you to treat my information above with some scepticism) when I was installing IDE devices in my Docks, I actually had problems figuring out which direction the Power cable was supposed to be plugged in (!). The IDE cable I figured out okay, but the little white cable with the four wires or whatever I plugged in upside down on more than one occasion. In those cases, I think the drives actually appeared to power up okay, but were not recognized properly. And when I flipped the little plug around and plugged it in the other way: the problem went away. Probably not a problem for most people, but something to double-check if you are not 100% sure.

- Lastly, you can check for some further details in the ThinkPad SelectaDock III User's Guide and User's Guide Supplement

Phil.

> Where would I find a 770 ultrabay tray?

There is no 770 UltraBay tray which holds more than one device (if that is what you're talking about with respect to the 760 tray). Any device which is compatible with the 770 series will fit in the Dock III UltraBay without an adapter: the Dock III UltraBay is identical to the 770 "UltraBay II". There is a 770 2nd Hard Drive Adapter which will allow you to insert a single 760 or 770 hard drive caddy into the adapter which then slides into the Dock III UltraBay slot just like any other UltraBay device. Pretty much any laptop hard drive will fit in a 770 caddy (it is 17mm high and standard width/length). I think you can get a 770 2nd Hard Drive Adapter and Caddy from Bill or from eBay. There are no adapters that I know of that will allow you to slide a 600 series "UltraSlimBay" device into the Dock III.

If you really need a floppy in addition to whatever else you install in the UltraBay of the Dock and in the IDE Device Bay of the Dock, then you can always use the proprietary IBM floppy cable to connect your 600 series floppy (or a 770 series one) to your Dock and then sit that floppy beside your dock somewhere on your desk (if you can find room!).

Phil.

OK....
Well I have a 760 tray and I was wrong ... It only holds 2 hdd's or a hdd and a floppy or cdrom.

Now my floppy isn't reading disks anymore ... Swapped with a known good one and still says " not formatted ... do you want to..." and floppy reads in other machine fine.

<----- Not having a good day.

You can have 2 hdd's in the dock but they have to be set to cable select on the 3.5" drive and one in a caddy on the bay tray w/ or W/out a floppy.

OK, on to the responses....

I have had the floppyand a 5 gig hdd in the tray with a 12gig hdd in the device bay in the dock and all work fine with the cdrom in the laptop. when I go to use the Zip drive in the USBay, it does not see the zip unless I disable the dock device bay, but then there are no drives seen in the dock.
That was cold swapped BTW.

Make sense so far ?????????

It shows my cdrom in the laptop as a pc card ( card with arrow over the top icon in taskbar area).

So what the question really is, is it possible to enable the 3rd IDE Channel under WIN2Kpro? This would allow all devices to work with the ZIP4IBM250 drive in the ultraslim bay in the laptop.

If So why can't I find that option in the configuration program? I'll play around with the configurator and see what I can accomplish.

Thanks