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Thinkpad 350 Hard Drive upgrade woes
Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 8:51 pm
by Topslakr
Ok, So I recently got my hands on 25mhz of raw processing power backed up by a full 4Megs of RAM. My goal is to install Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 for workgroups as well as Windows 95 and all was going well. I was just booting into Windows 95 'For the first time' when I heard the Hard Drive begin it's click of death. The Disk was 127Megs and I wasn't able to find a drive that small but I was able to find a 1GB drive that seems to be working in some capacity. It however only displays 25Meg of available space and the Bios doesn't offer any way of altering that. So.... what do I do now? Is it not possible to get 1GB to work? I can't seem to find a Bios upgrade which might add support for more hard disks nor can I find a disk that small. Has anyone had to deal with this issue lately? Is my best bet to buy a new old thinkpad from ebay? I'd like to have a computer I can poke around with for years to come with some of the old school OSes load in.....
Topslakr
Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 9:01 pm
by leoblob
Older machines of that vintage usually have a BIOS limitation of 528 megs. But you can get around that with a program like Western Digital's EZ Drive (Maxtor has their version of this, too). Basically, you boot from the floppy, and the program sets up partitions based on your BIOS limitations and the OS you're running. Then, you have access to the entire drive. I've done this many times with older desktop computers, and I assume it would work exactly the same with your Thinkpad.
I think you probably can download one of these programs for free off their web site.
Thank you very much!
Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 8:56 pm
by Topslakr
Worked great. I had seem some things on line suggesting programs like that but was never able to pin down who made what so I could never get a good search going for it. Once I searched for the Western Digital program I was up and running in about 10 minutes. Working great, and I really appreciate you help!
Topslakr
Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 9:13 pm
by AlphaKilo470
If you can find some old 72-pin desktop memory SIMMS, the 350/350c will take up to 32mb in the single expansion slot. With 36mb RAM and Windows 95, the 350c can be a surprisingly capable performer.
Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 10:16 am
by leoblob
Glad you got it running!
