Thinkpads Forum

I can't tell you how glad I was when I found a group devoted to this excellent piece of equipment!

I have owned a TP600e for many years and would like to expand its capabilities to the limit. Can someone tell me what is the largest hard-drive that this unit will accommodate? Is this HD size different for the internal drive and a drive mounted in the UltraSlim Bay HD adapter?

System Board S/N: J19RV833515
BIOS Version: INET36WW / 11-20-99

I am currently running WinXP Home Edition. I recently acquired a UltraSlim Bay HD adapter, and when I installed a drive in it, when I booted up, the system gave me a blank screen with an odd 'icon'(?) and the number 2 in the upper-left corner of the screen as though it was expecting an input from me. Has anyone seen this before.

I would appreciate any information available.

Apparently it will take up to 60 GB drives.

But, once you get to that, it would probably be a good idea to go with a good, fast (can you say 233X?) CompactFlash card in a 2.5" CF-to-IDE adapter in the main hard drive bay.

Is the icon in that error screen a cylinder? I'd just check to make sure that the HDD is seated in the adapter. If that doesn't work, put the primary hard drive in the adapter and see what happens.

Or, you could just wait until the machine boots, then insert the HDD into the bay and see what happens.

I don't think there is a 60GB limit on a 600E. There may be a limit of 128GB or so, depending on which operating system you are using and on how you partition the drive. You should not have any trouble on any drive smaller than 128GB. You can also install a drive bigger than that if you are determined to do so, but you may need to create a couple partitions, and you probably need to make sure that the first active/primary partition where your operating system is installed remains less than 128GB. There are some conflicting reports on how to get drives larger than 128GB to work correctly, and I suspect that the differences can mostly be attributed to differences between operating systems and whether or not one is running the latest drivers in whatever operating system is used. I can't say for sure. But if you stick to less than 128GB, then you should have no probems.

I have a 160GB drive in one of my 600X's with a couple partitions (none larger than 100GB), and I don't believe there are any differences in limitations of hard drive size between the 600X and the 600E, provided you are using the latest BIOS, which it looks like you are. Win XP Home is a slightly crippled version of XP, I think, and I do not have experience with it, but I run Win XP Pro SP2 and have had no troubles.

There are no differences between the specs for hard drives mounted internally vs. drives mounted in the UltraSlim Bay HD adapter.

When looking for drives, keep in mind that you need a PATA drive (an older type of interface), not a SATA drive (the most recent interface). You will find comparable PATA drives to be considerably more expensive than their SATA counterparts.

Regarding the icon and number error that you are getting, I'm not sure. Is it a known, good drive you are sticking in the UltraSlim Bay adapter? Or a blank new drive? Maybe your BIOS is trying to boot from that drive, and the drive has not yet been partitioned or formatted? This can cause an error that will prevent the Thinkpad from booting up the rest of the way, even if you don't want it to boot from that drive. You might want to go into the BIOS and remove the extra HDD from the Start Up sequence, if it is in there -- that will prevent the Thinkpad from trying to boot from it during startup, and then you should be able to partition the drive or whatever afterwards.

Phil.