Thinkpads Forum

The hard drive failed in my Thinkpad 600 a few days ago. When I was looking up prices, a CF card and adapter was half the price of a new hard drive, so I got that. However, the Thinkpad won't use it correctly. It apparently uses incorrect disk geometry. When I hook it up to another system, this is the geometry I get:

Disk /dev/sdc: 4017 MB, 4017807360 bytes
124 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1020 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7688 * 512 = 3936256 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x020eca03

However, the Thinkpad sees it as this:

Disk /dev/sda: 3753MB, 3753566208 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 456 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000251fa

It can't read or write the partition table, and I can't install an operating system on it. Is there any way to correct this problem? I'm already using a manual CMOS hack to disable the broken trackpoint. It doesn't have the latest BIOS revision (54), but it has the one before it (53), and I couldn't find any relevant known issues with it. I can't update the BIOS because I don't have a floppy drive for it, and my USB floppy doesn't work on it.

Any help is appreciated. If I can't get this working, I'm going to have to spend a lot more on a new, very large (200GB+) drive that may or may not work, or few hundred dollars on a replacement system.

Did you try formating in FAT32? Try formating the CF card in another machine in FAT32 and then install into the 600. It might just run for you. I had a similar problem and that did the the trick.

How big is the CF? If it's bigger than the 600's bios limit (possibly as low as 8 gig originally) you may need a bios upgrade, and you might have to partition it in another computer. What OS are you using? It may need some help too.

I tried formatting the CF as FAT32 from a Windows machine, but it still doesn't see the card correctly and can't read/write to the partition table.

The CF card is only 4GB. The hard drive that was in it and died was 30GB, so I'm sure that the size itself isn't the issue. I intend to install Windows 2003, since this is my print server, but I can't get any OS to use the disk correctly in the Thinkpad. The CF card in the IDE adapter connected to a USB adapter works correctly on both Windows and Linux on other computers, so I know the CF card and the IDE adapter are working. Things aren't looking too good.

I know the BIOS supports PCMCIA drives and booting from PCMCIA, so would this work better, or is it likely to have the same problem?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812150014

I went ahead and got that adapter. The good news is, it works properly and Windows was able to install to the CF card that way. The bad news is, the Thinkpad can't boot from it, so it just repeats the first part of Windows setup indefinitely. Has anyone else run into this issue? Maybe there's a boot CD that can chain load it or something?

I had similar issues with my CF card install until I made sure the adapters pins were all properly inserted into the IDE connector. To do that, I had to remove the keyboard and bezel so I could actually see the IDE connector. Otherwise, not all the pins were connecting, so the CF card would show up and Windows would act like it was formatting and installing to it, but then it would not boot. After getting it installed correctly, though it has been working perfectly for months.