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240X & Travelstar
Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 5:35 pm
by aldaden
Hi everyone
I have an old 240X running Windows 2K. the hard drive has always been noisy but recently it's gotten even louder and I'm a bit concerned that it might be on the way out.
Unfortunately I know nothing about hard drives.
'Travelstar' - what is that? A brand name? The type of drive?
I'm not sure what I should be looking at when looking for a replacement - Only 'Travlestars? A specific type of Travelstar?
Are there any size limitations? - It has an 11GB right now.
Any help greatly appreciated
Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 7:32 pm
by rkawakami
Travelstar = IBM (now Hitachi) mobile (i.e. laptop) hard disk drive. You can substitute any 2.5" hard drive following whatever interface standard your laptop uses. In your case, the 240X should be using parallel ATA, sometimes known as EIDE. I'd say that any recent vintage disk drive that says it's PATA, EIDE, Ultra DMA/33 or PIO Mode 4 (did I leave any out?) compatible will work.
I wouldn't think that there would be any practical size limitation, but I'd check with IBM's site to see if you have the latest BIOS revision. That information is available here:
BIOS file matrix
You can try searching around the archives here to see what other people have used or just sit tight and maybe someone else will come along and add to the thread.
(edit: P.S. Welcome to thinkpads.com!)
Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 8:38 pm
by aldaden
Many thanks for your help.
I just remembered I still had
SIW installed and I ran it through to see what I actually have right now if that's of any extra importance:
Code: Select all
Property Value
Type Fixed hard disk media
Vendor IBM
Model IBM-DARA-212000
Interface IDE ATA
Revision AR4OA51A
Size 12 GBytes
Removable No
Location Primary Controller - Master drive
Controller Buffer Size on Drive 418 KBytes
Capabilities DMA, LBA, IORDY_Disable, IORDY
PIO Mode Support 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4
DMA SW Mode Support Not Supported
DMA MW Mode Support 0 - 1 - 2
UDMA Mode Support 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 (ATA/66)
Current UDMA mode None
SMART Support Yes
One more question if anyone knows-
When I first got it I took an Acronis image of the drive (Norton's Ghost threw up a warning about something - probably needing more RAM)
Would I have problems putting the image on a larger drive? I've never used an image on a different drive that it was taken from before
Thanks again
Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 10:33 pm
by soyabean
The 240 with the latest bios will accept pretty much any 9.5mm IDE drive. Remember your objective is to get the computer working again, so don't discriminate for original 'Travelstar' drives, take whatever you can get. A huge surplus of 10/20/30/40Gb drives out there, everyone is upgrading. tImage away and have fun.