Thinkpads Forum

I've got a thinkpad 560Z. I wanted to upgrade the hard drive so I bought a 120GB Western Digital Scorpio HD. But the laptop doesn't seem to recognize the hard drive. It acts like there is something wrong with the hard drive. But the hard drive works fine in another laptop. I really want to use this hard drive. Is there a away to get this to work?

Paul

Hey Paul,

The 560Z uses the 440BX chipset, so it should recognize the drive just fine. Of course, the drive will be empty and installing an OS on it while it's in a 560Z can be tricky.

What have you done, what result did you get and what result did you expect? We can help with a little more information.

I'll have to try it again. I have an external floppy and a pcmcia cdrom drive. Right now the drive is in another laptop. I'm going to try it again later tonite and I'll have more info.

I had to install Ontrac Drive overlay software on my 560z to get it to use a 40 gig Seagate drive. Seagate, Hitachi and some others give away a free, brand specific version of Ontrac. Its either in the box with the drive or you can get it from their web site.

Some drives just won't work though.

I think there is a 7.44Gig limit per partition with Windows 98SE. Not sure if it's a BIOS limitation of the 560 or a Windows 98 issue. You didn't say what OS you're using.

Go onto Western Digital's site and download their EZ-Drive utility. It's free. That will take care of it, regardless of OS or BIOS limitations.

windows 98se will recignize a hard drive up to 137 gigs. the size listed in dos during f-disking and formating will be different,
but the ACTUAL size windows sees will be proper. NEVER install
a hard drive that has a TOTAL partioned and formated size greater than
137 gigs. if you do, the computer will eventually write to the boot sector of the drive accidently, and destroy the operating systim (if
your hard drive is greater than 137 gigs, only partion to the 137 gigs),
and let the rest go un-used. (do NOT try to create several partions
to overcome that limit, the same thin will happen) windows 98se and windows ME are too stupid, and will gladly partion and format to whatever size you want. xp is smart, and will only see the drive as a max of 137 gig. boot managers from the drive manafacturers sometimes cause other problems, and can not remidy the 137 gig limit. windows xp sp1, sp2, and vista have support for drives greater than 137 gigs. your bios may need to be updated to use the larger drive. i have a 380z that would only see a max of 8 gig partions, if they were larger, the computer would not boot. after the bios update, everything worked fine.
adrian

It just occurred to me that you might be trying to read from that drive.

It should work fine if you partition and format the drive in the 560Z (not 380Z) (perhaps after a needed BIOS upgrade), but it may well be impossible to read from the drive if it has been formatted in another non-ThinkPad laptop. This is because ThinkPads have their own ideas about drive geometry (columns, heads and cylinders) and enforce that partitions are exactly the way they want them to be.

Keep us posted.

Update: I meant 560Z the first time.

This thread may be helpful
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=35901

It contains useful suggestions for both overcoming the 8g boot partition limitation and installing and OS.