Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
Has anyone tried to upgrade the hard drive on a 560X. I plan to do this on my system.
Do you think I'll run into an upper limit on the size of the hard drive, or can I just use a 20GB disk. If I do use a 20GB disk, will it let me use all 20GB or only a part of it?

Thanks,
Anand Gadiyar

the thinkpad will only see the first 2 Gigs, but if you can partition the disk into 2 gig patitions before putting it in the 560 thinkpad, it will read these as seperate disks. I forget the limitations of Windows for the # of partitions Is it 4 for Dos? at any rate, you will need to partition the drive in another laptop, or use an adapter (cheap), to partition the drive with a desktop into 2 Gig chunks. It think with certain bootloaders you could have something like 24 two gig partitions in windows 95/98, so the limitation isn't so bad, as long as you are willing to work around it.

I do not have experience with your exact computer, but I have had experience putting larger drives in a number of other computers. The problem of a large drive in an older computer is solved using a program like Western Digital's EZ-Drive.. I think all the drive makers offer a program like this -- for free. You boot from a floppy and the program asks which OS you'll be using, it checks the BIOS, then writes stuff to the boot sector which allows you to use the whole drive's capacity. I've put a 5 gig drive in an old 486 whose BIOS only supported drives up to 528MB with no problems, for example. No partitions needed, depending on OS and size of your new drive.