Thinkpads Forum

I ordered an IBM Travelstar 12 gig internal hard drive on the Marketplace forum. When I installed it, since it was blank, nothing happened. So I put a floppy drive in the ultrabay (I don't have a compatable external floppy) and tried to boot from it.

It didn't work either.

The test program in easy setup says the drive is fine.

I tried installing it in another thinkpad, but the bios wouldn't recognize a drive that big. I tried the Ranish partition manager but it gets drive information from the bios(?) and crashed. OS/2 tried to install, but the Warp Doctor startup floppies required for a drive that big only work with the CD version, and I only have floppies!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!

Why won't the 760XD boot from an ultrabay floppy drive out of a 755CE that works perfectly with the original 3 gig drive?

Help!

Did you put the floppy drive first in boot order in BIOS?

Yes. The floppy is first, the hard drive is second, there isn't anything else to boot from.

One thing I found with the very old ThinkPads (like my 750P) is that the master/slave polarity is reversed. So, if the drive has jumpers, set it for slave and see what happens, or try some kind of utility that will see the disk (Ranish Partition Manager is my favorite, or Hitachi DFT or whatever handy). It could tell you if it sees a master or slave drive... which would let you know if switching might help.

In the 365ED, which will boot from an external floppy with the 12 gig drive installed, the bios has an 8 gig limit, so even ranish partition manager, a very nice program, crashes. Is there a way to get around the bios?

It doesn't seem to make any sense for the 760XD not to boot from the floppy with a blank hard drive installed. I'm guessing it's because I don't really have a floppy that's designed for it, but the ultrabay drive I've been using does work with no hard drive at all.

Bookworm, I have about a half dozen Thinkpad floppy drives here. If you can tell what part # you need I might have it...free for the asking. .e.g I have a 05K2643, which is an external floppy drive in an enclosure....everywhere I look says it works on a 600, not sure about a 760.

ooooh. I just remembered another thing: DOS has a bug regarding wacky partitions. I had a PPro tower that made any drive over 8GB report 256 heads instead of 255. DOS read this as 0 and would hang every time. I had to use Ranish Partition Manager to delete all the partitions before any DOS or Windows (up to 98) floppy would boot. I could never install DOS or W95 or W98 on that machine with a large drive, but NT worked great.

Anyway, I advise you to get Ranish or some other type of boot floppy (Linux or maybe DFT perhaps) that will let you delete all the partitions on the drive, then try again.

Well... I just re-read the original post. Hmm.

There is no way around the BIOS for booting. Also, the 3xx series BIOS is very different from the 7xx series BIOS.

I would check the master/slave setting using DFT. It will tell you the drives it detects on which connections. I would also try a tiny Linux distro that fits on a couple of floppies... maybe an old version of Slackware or LOAF...

An external floppy would be nice for installing any OS from your internal CD drive though.

Thanks harry, I'll try to get the part & fru #'s. So far all I know is the one that came with my 365ED works, but not with the 760XD, even though the connector is the same.

I found the problem. The 760XD has an 8 gig limit. There is a web site that describes my problem and symptoms exactly, now I know nothing is broken, and how to fix it. I was going to post the URL but it's in my other browser. I'll bring it later.

Apparently there is a driver on ibm.com by OnTrack that must be installed on the ThinkPad, but first I'll have to put it in the desktop and erase all partitions. The only local computer dealer is closed today, so
I'll order a desktop adapter monday.

Here's that link:

http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/~przemy ... 760xd.html

Bookworm wrote:In the 365ED, which will boot from an external floppy with the 12 gig drive installed, the bios has an 8 gig limit, so even ranish partition manager, a very nice program, crashes. Is there a way to get around the bios? ...

These partitioning programs are intended to get around BIOS limits. Have you tried Western Digital's Data Lifguard tools (used to be EZ-Drive)?

It creates a bootable diskette, and you follow the steps to partition your drive. I've had success with it on drives that are much bigger than the BIOS will recognize, as well as drives which are too big for the OS to recognize.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... 23&lang=en