Thinkpads Forum

I picked up a very clean looking 570 with a good battery today. Only problem is, no HD and no built in optical drive. I guess these things were designed to be ultra portable, so they were left without optical drives to keep them light and be used with a docking station for the extras.

I know the external floppy cases are interchangable between the 570's & the 600's, so i have one of those. But my question is, can I put a CD ROM into the external floppy enclosure? If i'm going to put a HD in this machine, I need a way to load an OS.

Or, can I load an OS on a 600 and swap drives? Or will that give me a blue screen on startup???

Thanks for your help.

Edit: I just read this post about how to instal an OS on a machine with no optical drive:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=41836

I would still like to know if the CD Rom works in the Floppy enclosure though?

Nevermind. I found my floppy case and the CD ROM will not fit inside the enclosure.

I will try to see if a 600 HD will work though without the blue screen. I'll let you know how that works out.....but I'm not holding out much hope.

A 600's cdrom will work with a 570 but it won't get recognized as cdrom off the external floppy port..... The floppy is an ISA device whereas the cdrom (or HDD) is an IDE device. The best that you could accomplish is to make them spin and that's all. Good try though.....

Snag an UltraBase, they're pretty inexpensive (most of the time) on fleabay. The same cdrom for your 600 will work in the UltraBase. The floppy is another story, there is a serial connector inside the UB that makes it unique, at least the end cap to it is and rare to find. Your external floppy will still work in the floppy port with the laptop docked.

Just a heads up. I have both 600 and 570 machines. If you get an Ultrabase for the 570, you'll have to remove the plastic trim (one screw) from the bottom of your TP600 CD-ROM to make it fit. Andy