Thinkpads Forum

the machine arrived w/ neither HD nor caddy. The functional part of the caddy is a brown flexible fiber fitment w/ standard 2.5 inch IDE drive pinholes on one side, and a proprietary IBM connector on the other. It's about the size of your little finger. Let us call this litment the connector. Findings with different on-hand drives reveals
1. machine boots w/ 340mb drive from 360cs
2. nine non-booting combos
-drives: 810mb DSOA-20810, 1080mb DMCA-21080, 6000mb DARA-206000
-connectors: 29H9422, 66G0118 (frm 360cs), 82H5532
(DMCA-21080+29H9422 boots in the 360cs)
3. the Thinkpad mailing-list archive ideas (march 1997 was good) include bending HD pin #48 to reverse the master/slave sensing: while not yet prepared to do that I did cut away on a 29H9422 so as to expose the 4 isolated pins including 48: no cigar. I also tried a tiny jumper from another drive: ditto.

ideas, please? I'm sentimentally attached to the 760 series--first Thinkpad was a 760e--and prefer this guy to run something more interesting than pc-dos 3.3:-)

thanks
tom

I believe the key is the pins on the 340MB drive, vs the larger drives. I had a similar problem replacing the original 170MB drive in my TP360 with an 810MB drive taken from my TP365. I believe the 170MB and 340MB drives are of the same era, since both were offered on the TP360, TP360Cs and I suspect other early machines.

I seem to recall cutting off 4 pins on the 810MB hard drive to make it work. I also vaguely remember plugging the new hard drive in, with its position shifted over from where the 170MB drive was. If you compare the pins on the 340MB drive to those on the 810--and look at where they plug into the IDE cable, I think you will find 4 pins on the 810 where are not needed.

the drive spec for master slave selection was reversed someplace around the time the 820meg gave way to a 1gig or 1.2gig..

i probably have a universal cable, here, someplace..
and might also have the whole aftermarket HDD caddy..

the 760 series used two different cables..
one for the thin body 760 series and one for the thick body 7y60 series..
there were also 17mm and 12mm drives used in those machines..