Thinkpads Forum

Have recently purchased a 760Xl on ebay and the floppy drive is not being recognised. There was no OS on the machine when purchased so I am stumped unless I can purchase another FDD. Before doing so, is there any way in which I can check if in fact the FDD is faulty ? On opening up the lid, the connections do not appear to be very firm so am wondering if in fact that is the case. Any suggestions please. Thanks..Ed

ed..

well, pull the floppy and reinsert it to be sure the plug is fully connected..

another thing you might try is after reseating the floppy drive start the thinkpad and press F1 on bootup to go into the bios setup..
its been a long time but the floppy should be listed there in bold in the test menu..

Have tried those Bill, thank you- more than once
The bios test runs fine- but the FDD remains blank.


Cheers..Ed

The 755 and 760s that allow either a CD or floppy to be plugged in to the left bay have a tendency to have one function or the other go bad. It is usually caused by trying to hot swap drives. The drive itself can be bad, too but if floppy is greyed out in EZ setup I am pretty sure the motherboard is bad.

Sounds like the floppy is toast.

I had the same issue with my first 760. It concerned instead a CD drive. Bought a brand new cd drive and all was well again.

More than likely if someone tried to hot swap the drive with full power it shorted the drive. One of two things take the hit, either the dc/dc card or the device. Since you can get into the BIOS the dc/dc card is working fine. It takes a few moments for the 760's to go into suspend after the keyboard is raised. I could swap a drive easily in the time it takes on some, I'll explain further down.

A short is caused during the swap by the connector pins not being engaged/disengaged equally across the connector. Loss of ground with
full power and zap. Under Suspend Mode the voltage is reduced to a trickle if not cut off to the connector. Same applies to the hard drive connector.

Personal opinion but I'd buy a cdrom and a new "external" floppy drive. Both are inexpensive on Ebay. You'll use the cdrom more often than the floppy. The 765's use a 20X cdrom and is backwards compatable with 760's. The XL came with a 8X.

*Just a note, check the Suspend Mode Switch at the front lip under the keyboard. If it sticks then it wouldn't suspend the laptop, hence a fried floppy drive. The switch is a weakness of the 760's, (especially for the tech challenged.) I've had to fix or replace several......they were pretty beat up.

Thanks for all that. Had thought along those lines myself, however looking under the bonnet, there does not appear to be sufficient space for a cd drive in the place where the floppy drive sits. And the spec for the XL/XD only mentions a CD-Rom on the XD. So I am probably stuck with a replacement floppy. And perhaps a bit think, but I could not identify the suspend mode switch !!

Cheers..Ed

You have to remove the floppy to insert the cdrom. I own both an XL and an XD. I have cdrom drives in both. I know where your coming from, been there. Any 760 that originally came with a floppy can have it replaced by a cdrom drive. I used my XL's floppy in an external enclosure made by IBM.

I cannot explain in detail the location of the switch. You'll have to look for it. It isn't in the HMM either. It's flush with the rest of the bottom. You won't see a switch, you'll see the cam, it's sloped and recessed in. The switch itself is under the palm rest. Your looking for a hole basically. There is a protuberance on the base near the battery's back end that activates the switch cam.

You will have guessed that I am a complete novice at looking inside any kind of laptop. Thanks for all the help. As you suggested earlier, my best bet is to try to find a CDrom. Not may about on ebay at the moment. I note that you say that later models are backward compatible so hopefully one will turn up, or an external with a serial connector. Are there any pitfalls to be watched for in this exercise ?

Cheers..Ed

Have been having further thoughts on this and it occurred to me that I will still need a floppy drive, will I not ? With no OS installed then I will need to boot up from a floppy in order to install Win98 or whatever from the CD drive. Or will I be able to boot up from the CD and then go straight into a install ?

Cheers..Ed

I sort of guessed and it's an honor to help.

Normally I do a broad search on Ebay, "IBM Thinkpad 760" and that will turn up all items for sale with "760" in the title. Which Ebay are you using?

If you can find an 8X cdrom that is the one that sold with the XD model. A 20X was original equipment with the 765D which will work in any 760, same connector. 4X and 6X are the two other speeds availale and are generally a few years older. All the cdroms for 760's where internal because of the "hot swap" feature of the laptop.

Here's one for you and they will ship worldwide. It's new too.

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-IBM-CDROM-CD-RO ... dZViewItem

Thanks for the suggestion- am currently bidding on a external with parallel connection which I hope is going to do the trick. If I fail, then I will order that one from the States. I use e bay Australia, but always use the worldwide search as I have never had problems with buying overseas....Ed

The problem with an external cdrom drive is I'm not sure if it will work. The external floppy drive has a dedicated special port for it. I think with an external cdrom the driver will have to be loaded from floppy or already installed in the OS for it to work.

You might want to see what you can find out first. I have a pcmcia cdrom and it doesn't work without special drivers being loaded onto the existing OS. I tried to write them into my Win98 boot floppy without any success so far.

Well not exactly a novice as such- only with looking inside laptops!!
I even understood DOS once upon a time Oh well I now have my CD rom but will still have to search for a floppy drive. I won one on ebacy but the sell reneged. will continue....Ed