Thinkpads Forum

Hi

I recently acquired a 600E (2645-5JU model) with INET30WW BIOS and the original 4GB hard drive. I've ordered a floppy drive so I can flash the bios to INET36WW (1.16), but I'm curious about one thing.

Do any of the intermediate bios changes address hard drive size limits? I've already tried installing a Hitachi 7200rpm 100GB drive, and it wasn't recognised. The drive had been formatted to FAT32 under Mac OS X, so I'm wondering, if it's not the bios that's stopping it, perhaps the Mac uses a partitioning scheme that the Thinkpad doesn't like.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Thanks!

Matt

Try partitioning and formatting the drive in the 600E. It should handle drives up to 120GB.

whizkid wrote:Try partitioning and formatting the drive in the 600E. It should handle drives up to 120GB.

... with latest BIOS.

Well, I think the issue with that particular drive was that it was dead (if it wasn't dead before I put it in the Thinkpad, it certainly was afterward), so I'm going to get hold of another one. I did successfully install a 20GB drive, but it's also 4200rpm, so not really any faster.

The BIOS change list doesn't list hard drive limit increase, though, which is why I'm confused.

Matt

slightly wrote:The BIOS change list doesn't list hard drive limit increase, though, which is why I'm confused.

It does list fixes for Linux, Windows XP, and installing any OS from a booted CD, so it might be worthwhile anyway.

There shouldn't be an issue with the drive size, but there well could be one of drive geometry, which can be read differently in ThinkPads, making all the partitions unusable if the partitions are made on another machine.