Thinkpads Forum

Hello all,

I am new to the forum and have just purchased a Thinkpad 760c laptop. I have read through a great deal of posts on this forum and they have been extreamly helpful to me. I was hoping to find an external CD-ROM drive that I could plug into one of the PCMCIA slots. I know my PCMCIA slots are only 16-bit which defenitly limits what the laptop can use, and I believe that I can't swap out the floppy drive for a CD-ROM. So, am I stuck trying to find an old IBM made CD drive or will drives made by other manufacturers work as well?

On a totally different subject I got this laptop for almost nothing because it has some driver issues that the previous owner did not feel like trying to fix. To my dismay, when I tryed to access the driver and bios update pages on IBM's website they were all down for the 760c. I was hoping that someone on the forum that may have gotten the files from IBM before they killed all of the 760 information could send me the files or that someone may know of an alternate location to obtain these files. I am hoping to pop in a 5-10 gig hard drive and reload win 98 provided I can find a CD-ROM that will function on this machine.

Thanks

One of my 760's is a thin height 760E which uses the same shell as the 760c. I have a SCSI card and an old 6x external SCSI CD drive that used to go to the HP OmniBook 800CT I used to own. That setup seems to work fine. You could probably find a SCSI card and CD drive on eBay.

As far as drivers go, well, it seems IBM's taken most stuff off of their website. You'll be able to find a few patches and the configuration utility. You'll have to look around for everything else.

Thanks for the tip about SCSI drives, I didnt even think of that. Do you know by chance if I could load windows 98 using a SCSI card and drive if I have a win98 boot disk?

I'm pretty sure you can because if I remember right, the Windows 98 setup boot floppy has SCSI drivers on it.

Cool, thanks for your help.

I recently bought an IBM SCSI PC Card on Fleabay. It works fine in Windoze and came with DOS drivers on floppy. I had the card in the PCMCIA slot while booting with Win98 and WinMe (!) startup disks a SCSI CD on the bus wasn't recognized either time. The card has a Future Domain chipset and I'd have to edit the .bat etc. files on a startup disk along with copying the DOS driver over. No big deal and it's fun learning how them old DOS files were wired. If you got an Adaptec card then it's likely the default startup disk drivers will work (dunno if there's anything unique about the PCMCIA chipset though).

Another option is to go with a Dock 1 or Dock 2 (but the 2 is HUGE) if you find a good deal on one. I bought a Dock 1 when I first got my 760XL and liked it a lot (well made and cool looking) and came with a built-in CD, ISA expansion slot, and SCSI-1 I/F. The CD was like a 2X and had trouble reading certain recorded disks. It's also a weird SCSI half-height drive so finding an upgrade would have been problematic, but it was very solid... The external SCSI connector is a very odd half-pitch 50-pin that takes a $50 cable (you'd have to find on ebay) for external devices, but that part worked well too. The ISA slot might also be an option for a SCSI card with a more conventional connector. Anyway, I reluctantly sold the Dock and moved up to a SelectaDock setup which has a newer SCSI-2 connector. I looked up the specs on the 760c and it's not a PCI backplane machine so it will only work with the early Dock 1 or 2. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the advice! I have found a PCMCIA cd-rom from panasonic that hooks up to a PCMCIA II card. Is the PCMCIA II slot a 16 bit or 32 bit slot? It seems like it would be 16 bit because according to IBM's hardware mantinance guide the 760c has two PCMCIA II slots. Thanks again for the help.

PCMCIA is 16 bit and will work with your computer. If it says CardBus, then it's 32-bit and will not work on a 760C.

Thanks for the quick reply. This forum and its posters have been a huge help.