Thinkpads Forum

Hi all, what i really want to know is does the 600e have a hardrive max size limit? I will probably just go for the small 40gig one but i need to know the bios supports this size?

Also just to make sure i buy the correct one could someone please tell me the specs for the new drive ie. pata 2.5" ect ect.

Regards Stephen.

It will hold the largest PATA 12.5mm hard drive available, now around 200GB. The BIOS will need to be updated to the most recent (11/99).

The only other potential hard drive size limitation would be based on the OS.

Thanks @ the moment my new 600e is without a drive so i shall stick a 40gig in her,

My 600 has a very noisy 5gig drive wich needs changing as soon as possible also.

I shall pick up a new one tomorrow, thanks for the help.

P.S. Just out of interest are most of the smaller drive's ie 40gig 12.5mm or less or do i need to be carefull which one i buy?

Yeah, most are 9.0-12.5mm. I jsut wanted to add that, incase for some strange reason you found the really thick 17mm drive. Generally these are les than 20gb, so you shouldn't have a problem.

Thanks again.

Hi, i put a 40gig 8mb buffer drive in and a went superb, Well so far i have only installed the drive and formatted it with Partition Magic.

Christmas shopping ect. ect has took over installing Windows.

As this lappy only has 96mb ram installed (at the moment) i will go for windows 2k i think.

Anyone run 2k with 96mb of ram? How is performance?

My other thinkpad 600 has 128mb with XP Pro and runs fine slowish but fine.

Steph69 wrote:Anyone run 2k with 96mb of ram? How is performance?

I would say comparable to XP Pro with 128MB RAM.

That should do i suspect, all i want to do with these laptops is browse the net over wireless connection, got all cards today with a new router so all should be well on christmas morning.

Fingers x-ed.

Hello !

I used to have 96 MB on my first TP600. And Windows 2000 was running fine (I have to say I had tweaked it a lot )

The only nitpick, IMHO, with 2K and not plenty of RAM, is the time taken to boot. Get ready to have a coffee or to go in a restaurant everytime you'll start the laptop...

I've seen in other posts that 600E won't recognize 160 GB HDD.

Are you sure it will handle 200 GB ones ?

W.

I've run Win 2k with 64MB of ram with no problems, but it will need to be tweaked to off load the ram usage Win 2k will use by default. Basically its just services that need to be disabled. You can use Google to figure out what services you don't need.

Yeah, i ran it before with 64mb in an old compaq PC, Well it was new at the time, When i think back it was the fastest home pc @ time i bought it, it was AMD k6 @ 366mhz.

I forgot all about that.

Thinkpads are ver capable PCs, I have no idea how its possible but you can run WinXp Sr2 on 64MB ram if ya try
Thinkpads are very stable and strong systems IMO!

Fusion wrote:Thinkpads are ver capable PCs, I have no idea how its possible but you can run WinXp Sr2 on 64MB ram if ya try

I ran WinXP Pro on a TP240 with 64MB RAM and 366MHz Celeron for a while. It was unacceptably slow.

To Steph69

Hi all, what i really want to know is does the 600e have a hardrive max size limit? I will probably just go for the small 40gig one but i need to know the bios supports this size?

The BIOS of TP600E recognizes only upto 137GB. So the largest drive natively supported by BIOS is 120GB.

If you don't mind living with Disk Drive Overlay utility, the HDD recognition is done by DDO, not BIOS. So there is no limitation in terms of the HDD capacity. In this case, you can put a 160GB HDD into 600E.

No 200GB PATA 2.5" drive exists at this point of time. Both Toshiba and Fujitsu 200GB drives are SATA, so the maximum capacity for your 600E remains 160GB.

shined wrote:The BIOS of TP600E recognizes only upto 137GB. So the largest drive natively supported by BIOS is 120GB.

Win2K SP4 and WinXP SP1 might be able to overcome that barrier though. I've used computers with BIOS that could recognize only up to 64GB, but 200GB HDDs worked fine with WinXP SP2.

shined wrote:If you don't mind living with Disk Drive Overlay utility, the HDD recognition is done by DDO, not BIOS. So there is no limitation in terms of the HDD capacity. In this case, you can put a 160GB HDD into 600E.

I believe that the 137GB carrier is a Windows limit...not the BIOS.

Worse case scenario....partition it into two drives....

tfflivemb2 wrote:I believe that the 137GB carrier is a Windows limit...not the BIOS.

Yes it is, but I bet the BIOS has its own limit too, and it's most likely even less than 137GB for the 600E. It's usually not a problem because, as I said, the OS can overcome it.

137GB is the BIOS limit, not the Windows limit.

As long as your booting partition is less than that limit, you'll always be fine. If your first partition is over that limit, you'll be fine as long as the bootloader files are on that first part of the drive, which they usually are, unless a patch updates them and they happen to land elsewhere.

I back up whizkid's comment. I'm sure that 137GB limit is due to BIOS.

If you do not install DDO, the boot partition must reside within 137GB from the top of the HDD. Once the controll is passed to Windows, the Windows OS system does not use BIOS for HDD access so you can access anywhere of the HDD of any size.