Thinkpads Forum

Sorry for my English.
I have a ThinkPad 760E with Pentium 133MHz and 48MB of RAM. Yesterday I got a Hitachi HDD, it's a 6GB Hitachi DK23AA-60. It was checked in my old Dell Latitude, and it works perfectly (surface test is also OK).

After a BIOS update (to newest version from IBM's website, taking battery from ThinkPad 560 and using couple of wires) I decided to try if IDE is OK. It was OK - 500MB drive from 486 TP started Windows 95.

So, I put Hitachi in my 760E, turned it on and: ERROR 174.
I can't enter setup (F1 at startup), but I can boot from floppy. Both DiskManager and FDisk are useless - they don't detect this drive.

How to make this drive compatible with this laptop?

And about these instructions with DiskManager on Thinkpads.com: Low level formatting has been disabled in DM 4 or 5.x because it's lethal for an IDE drive. Creating a single 1GB partition doesn't work too.

Run active killdisk and write zero's to the entire drive including the boot sector.

http://www.killdisk.com/

What size was the original hard drive? The hard drive connector that came on caddies fitted to the stock drives below 3gb have a different wiring configuration than the caddies fitted to the 3gb and up drives. As a result, in a 760, the stock caddies that work with your 6b drive are ones that originally came fitted to a 3gb or bigger drive.

->AlphaKilo470
Probably connector causes the problem - I took a caddy from 500MB drive.

Is it a complete different cable scheme or just a few pins are swapped?

->HarryC
I tried it, but with MHDD - it can erase all user space.

The 4 isolated pins that control master/slave setting are wired differently. If you snip the cable as to disable those four pins, the connector should work fine with the drive; I've had to do that operation myself a few times. Just be incredibly careful with the snipping and afterwards, be incredibly careful with the ribbon. In my experience, the connector ribbon is brittle and easy to make useless. The ribbon cable for my 760XD broke last time I tried removing it's hard drive so I'll probably be hitting eBay soon for a replacement unless someone around here wants the computer sans the HD caddy.

BTW, with a few differences including basic shape and cable length, the connectors for the 360, 750, 755 and 760 are essentially the same.

Thanks a lot!
I've disconnected these 4 pins in a hard drive.
Unfortunately, BIOS couldn't detect this drive at all. So I connected pins 27 to 59 and 53 to 60 (in the other side of TP "plug"), as it was written in some German web page. It works!

Another problem: Why this laptop slows down when docked into IBM Dock II (this big machine with SCSI, 2xISA and speakers)?
When docked, win98 launch takes about 3 minutes. Undocked: 40 seconds. All disk operations are very slow.

What do you have plugged into the dock?. Try disconnecting one thing at a time. USB devices are notorious for slowing down boot, particularly external USB drives.

MCbx wrote:Thanks a lot!
I've disconnected these 4 pins in a hard drive.
Unfortunately, BIOS couldn't detect this drive at all. So I connected pins 27 to 59 and 53 to 60 (in the other side of TP "plug"), as it was written in some German web page. It works!

Another problem: Why this laptop slows down when docked into IBM Dock II (this big machine with SCSI, 2xISA and speakers)?
When docked, win98 launch takes about 3 minutes. Undocked: 40 seconds. All disk operations are very slow.

Hi what german page did you find it from?

the 2.5 IDE connector only have 44 pins, how can you plug into pin 59 and 60?