Thinkpads Forum

Since I have an upgrade mother board on the way (thanks, Peter), I'd like to put a bigger hard disk in my 701C to replace the 360 MB in there now. I would have guessed that a machine of that vintage would be limited to 512 MB by the BIOS, but some models of the 701C come with 720 MB. So what is the limit? 8GB? I searched here and Googled but did not find an answer.

Hi Paul,

When I wanted to replace the HDD on my 701C I decided to search for an answer on the same question. What I recall now was an information on a forum (it may have been this one but I am not certain because I simply forgot ...) that the 701C will handle anything up to 6,4 GB (this is the BIOS limitation). A word of caution - when I got my 4,8 GB disk, I performed the OS install on another notebook. When I placed the HDD in the 701C during boot I got an I/O error when Windows loaded. The solution was to perform a format on the 701C itself and then to copy the contents of the CD on it and lastly, perform the install form the HDD. So don't forget this during the upgrade. I hope that I helped you,

sb102

sb102;
Thanks for the reply --that information is helpful. Usually, when the limit is said to be 6.4 GB, it's actually 8 GB. For a while, 6.4 GB was the largest hard drive IBM had available. Fortunately, I have an IBM/Hitachi 10 GB drive, and I can use the "Feature Tool" program to set its size to 8 GB. I'll report back here whether it works.

Useful information is found here;

http://bharucha.com/tp701/

Make sure a small part of your drive is formatted in FAT16 format to avoid the 'hibernation issue'

8GB should work, as others stated, and drives that can be limited to 8GB should work.

Be sure to partition and format the drive in the machine, as old ThinkPad BIOSes do strange things with CHS translation.