Thinkpads Forum

Hello

I have an old 365x which had a 2 GB drive, i wanted to replace that one with an Toshiba drive 12 GB from a Armada E500, which has a broken display and no ram, but the 365x doesn't detect the new drive, it waits a long time on the bios screen, then it continues and i start up a Win98 Start disk and wanted to start fdisk, which says no harddrives found.

What can I do to get it working, it''s not the cage, it does not cover the jumper pins. Which jumper setting must i make?

On my 750P (a very old machine), I just put in a 12GB drive. The old machines used a different standard for master and slave, which is the opposite of the current standard.

My machine saw the drive as a slave drive, and fdisk reported no fixed disks. EasySetup said there was no hard drive.

I had to bend pin 1 so it made no contact. Since then, the machine sees the drive as an 8GB drive. If you can get a BIOS overlay, it might use the whole drive.

jeeva wrote:What can I do to get it working, it''s not the cage, it does not cover the jumper pins. Which jumper setting must i make?

Check with the HD's manufacturer for drive overlay software to allow the 365's BIOS to see it.

The 365 is limited to either 6GB or 8GB HDs, don't remember which. Unlike the 75X and 76X machines this isn't a Master/Slave problem.

Regards,

James

I tried that too, but the tool told me also no hard disk found. By the way, the HDD (Toshiba) is not defective, I tried it on another PC with an 2.5 inch adaptor cable, installing the tool there and replug was unsuccessful.

Any other ideas? A jumper to reduce to 8 GB like these on 40 GB desktop HDs?

A big hint I had was that HGST's Feature Tool and Drive Fitness test both detected the drive and told me it was the secondary drive. If DFT won't work for you at all, then I have nothing else for you. I hope someone else does.

jeeva wrote:Any other ideas? A jumper to reduce to 8 GB like these on 40 GB desktop HDs?

No, there's no capacity limiting jumper on most laptop HDs.

For the record, most Toshiba HDs are Masters with NO jumpers installed.

Regards,

James

Lately, EVERY suggestion I make regarding large HDDs in older Thinkpads is WRONG... so with that caveat in mind...

I might suggest you put the 2.5" drive back into the PC. Use fdisk to make two 6GB partitions. Then see if it works in your Thinkpad. I am running a 6.49GB drive in my 365x with no problems.

Good luck!

Ok, thanks for your assistance, I'll try them all, but now the 365X is not here, so I'll try it later.

Thanks

The first success, Feature tool detected the drive as Primary Slave, nothing on Primary Master, but every Jumper setting returned to Primary Slave, next I try to make Partitions on my other PC, except anyone has an idea to make that master.

Now I installed Debian on it, Linux from any flavour detected the drive, I made a 35 MB boot Partition, a 1 GB Swap Space and the remaining Space as root, I installed GRUB but still no success in booting with the drive, thanks to an old SUSE Startup Disk I could start the system. Anyone an idea how to start the System without help?

If your BIOS won't start the drive, then it won't start the drive.

The BIOS will start the floppy, and that can have anything on it, like a program to boot the slave drive.

You might see if you can add a PCMCIA drive (disk or flash) and have that do the same thing your floppy does, or put your boot partition there (but it will be slower than a disk).

What devices can you select in your BIOS startup order? As an example, my 750P shows HDD-1 to HDD-4 (and a slave drive did not show up as HDD-2, those would be dock drives), FDD-1 and -2, and... network. So that would mean I'd have to stay with floppy on there. (Although it would be very cool to boot over a network on that thing!) My 600X shows HDD-1 to -4, FDD, PCMCIA, CDROM and Network on the "Power On" and "Network" startup options. I'm sure the newer machines also allow you to boot at least some USB devices. No help for you though.

Ok, now I give it up and just put in the old 2 gig on it and wait until I have RAM for my E500 or get back my Toshiba Satelite and try it there, now i'm installing Debian onto the 2 gig drive. Thanks for the ideas.

First, this site has helped me alot, thanks...

I have a 2621-460 that exhibited the very same behaviour, and I read this post some months ago, but more recently something clicked... XP Setup would run and find the HDD, however the BIOS alone or Win98 boot disk saw no HDD... Certain utilities could see and/or access the HDD... The problem is since BIOS saw no HDD, it would not boot it, but only boot the XP setup which would go in an infinite loop of copying files to the HDD...

This solution requires a boot floppy for every single time you power on the system... Also it will be 20-30 secs before you even see the XP splash screen, I don't know why... It seems the issue is the Toshiba HDD firmware and I have not found anything close to a flash for it...

Foundation

Short story:
Boot XP setup CD, run first portion of setup (copy files)...

Go to M$.com (obviously on second system), get XP floppy setup program here , but only create the first floppy... Delete all the files on the floppy (you only need the boot portion from disk 1).

Extract NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR and BOOT.INI from the HDD you are installing on and copy to the floppy... Rename NTLDR to Setupldr.bin

Set the system BIOS to boot from Floppy, then CD, then HDD...

Insert floppy in FDD, insert setup disk in CD drive and boot system...

You should now see the second (GUI) portion of XP Setup, once the system restarts again, you will need the floppy and everytime afterwards you will need the floppy...


Long Story: Reading this post I noticed the system was able to boot with a SUSE startup disc and my mind finally began working...

I searched and found the M$ article on booting a system that would not boot, however it was either my NTDETECT or BOOT.INI file that was not working... (most likely I didn't edit my BOOT.INI file correctly)... Either way, after extracting the files and rebooting I was smiling...

2 methods for extracting the files: 1-use a external bay adapter setup or connect to desktop system as 2nd drive and extract files, or 2- I used a program named ERD Commander 2003 on a CD called Techie's Toolkit 3; it looks like an extreme lite version of XP and it allowed me to access the HDD and FDD without removing the drive...

Reading from the floppy is SLOW... So what I did to try speed up the boot process is to create a bootable CD, well this shaved about 10 secs loading time off, so it takes about 15-20 to see the Splash screen... I accomplished this using dd.exe from www.nu2.nu it is a small utility used to create an image file from a floppy, I then used the image to make a bootable CD with Nero... Rather that waste space this CD should be used at THE Thinkpad CD, so load up the latest drivers, updates, codecs and some MP3s... You will need the CD to boot the system so might as well fully utilize it...

The HDD is used was from my old Compaq 1200XL-106 from 98, sure I coulda just bought a HDD and maybe have less of a headache but I just didn't want to waste a HDD, besides, with the money now I can get a wireless card or mouse or steak dinner...

Thanks again for your help, if you have an questions just reply