Thinkpads Forum

Does anyone know if the Portable Drive Bay can be used under XP SP3? And, on a related note, does anyone know if you can use the Portable Drive Bay with more recent ThinkPad models, in particular the X60T?

I have several Portable Drive Bay units that allow me to attach UltraBay Slim devices from the 600 series onto other 600/770 machines via the PCMCIA slot. There is no driver for XP for these devices. However, I know that you can use the Windows 2000 driver with any 600X, 770E, 770Z machine and it will work fine. XP initially mis-identifies the device as a Portable Drive Bay 2000, which is a different beast altogether. Once you install the Win2000 driver, you can simply update the driver and manually point to the directory where the Win2000 driver resides and then everything should be good to go.

I tried to install one of my Portable Drive Bay units on my X60T, however, and I can't get it to work. I figure that it is either not compatible with the X60 due to BIOS/hardware issues, or it is not compatible with XP SP3 (all my other XP machines are running XP SP2).

Any help solving the problem or figuring out which of these two theories is right would be appreciated.

Phil.

The Portable Drive Bay works well under XP prof SP3. July 2009 I've tested it with 600x and X60t with XP Tablet Edition/SP3 (and Gericom XP home/SP3 ) .

The 600x may not boot from Portable Drive Bay - the BIOS from 600x doesn't know the adaptor (thank you IBM ).

Booting X60t I haven't tested

Driver... sorry, I don't recognize well... but may check this next weekend.

I'm not 100% sure, but very sure, using Portable Drive Bay within hdd... and the bay was also seen by Acronis True Image (I had to copy a hdd with the terrible Gericom ).

Thanks, u.mac.

That answers all my questions. I'll try to get it working again on my X60T when I have a chance. I was able to see the device on myX60T, but I could not see the hard drive I had in it.

Phil.

Hello Phil!

Today checked... the Portable Drive Bay runs here 'out of the box' - without any special driver - with 600x / XP SP3 and X60t with XP tablet edition SP3.

Edit:
Tested with DVD-rw and IDE-to-CF-card-Adapter with 8GB CF-card.
Idea... do you know, that the Portable Drive Bay only supports drives up to 120 (128?) gb?

Uwe.