Driver needed for Ultra Bay 2000 PCMCIA

[William Lueders]

Hi all!
I have a IBM portable drive bay (P/N 00N7940, FRU 37L1513) with the PCMCIA interface card (P/N 00N7942, FRU 33L5033). It does not want to install under XP Home. The system will see the drive, properly identify it as a "IBM Portable Drive Bay 2000" and try to install as a PNP device. At the completion of the install it registers that the device did not install correctly and I might have problems naking it work. This message is correct as the drive bay won't work.
I have tried this with two systems (570E, 500mg, 320mb ram & A20p with 512mb ram) both running XP Home with same results. I went to IBM and downloaded the driver pack there but there is nothing for use with XP. I did try the other listed drivers (95, 98, ME, 2000) with no luck. Nothing worked.
I have loaded and unloaded till blue in the face and it just won't install. Who knows how to get this to work? Other location for drivers? Ideas?

[G-Man]

You didn't say what drive you have, CD-ROM, DVD etc? You don't need any driver for XP. It should automatically recognize it. But the DVD-ROM won't work until you change the DMA settings:

Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>IDE ATA/ATATI controller>Secondary IDE>Advanced Settings>Select DMA is available>OK>Close>Restart.

If you happen to have a system with Win 2k or lower around the house, try it with the driver. Have you tried with the USB? If it's an Ultrabay 2000, it should have USB connectivity as well.

Let us know how it works.

Regards,
G-Man

[William Lueders]

Hi G-Man,
Didn't have a drive in the bay. I have tried to get it recognized with and without any drive. I have a dvd and a cdrw that both failed to be recognized when the drive bay was plugged in. Same message "error in installing drive bay, your new hardware may not work"!

The only way to attach this divice is with the PCMCIA cable that came with it. It shows the correct part mumber and FRU for the drive bay on the IBM site. If there is a USB cable available I don't have it. I could find nothing on the IBM site about a USB cable either.

More ideas? I don't have a system with 98 on it but may try to boot the 570 on a rescue disk with 98 and try that. Other than this I don't know what is up with XP. Help![/quote]

[G-Man]

It's a Portable Drive Bay (P/N 37L1511), and not Portable Drive Bay 2000. The only difference is that PDB 2000 has USB connectivity as well. I'm not in front of my TP, but the origin of the problem might be that windows recognizes it as PDB 2000. Try to check if you can choose regular PDB from the hardware list. I'm using PDB 2000 with my TransNote and had no problem installing it.

Regards,
G-Man

[snife]

Its been a while since i used one of these things but if you download the windows 2000 drivers for the pdb2000 from:

http://www.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/ ... IGR-4TFTHR

extract those drivers to a folder and then in device manager update the driver for the device - choose "Install from a list or specific location" and
"Don't search. I will choose the driver to install" and point it at the
PCMCIA subdirectory of the extracted drivers and hopefully it should work.

[G-Man]

Yes, but he is using XP, and you don't need driver for PDB (PDB2000) under XP, only under 95/98/Me/2000.

Regards,
G-Man

[William Lueders]

GMan is right!
I have the "Portable Drive Bay" not the "2000" one. I did the install with the "select the driver to use" indicated and it gave me the W2K driver again. This didn't work this time either but now it shows in Device Manager as a Secondary IDE device which I believe is correct. Before this it showed as a SCSI devoce.
Someone on the Thinkpad list suggested a roll back and removal of all drivers and then try the manual install. This will be the next step. One other fellow, well known for excellent advice said he gave up!
I would like to get this going. Could be helpful.

[snife]

My advice is for the Portable Drive Bay not for the Portable Drive Bay 2000 - the Portable Drive Bay is officially not supported under XP that is why you need to use the workaround of the W2K driver for the PDB2K (which normally wouldn't need drivers in XP)

[snife]

OK, i have dragged one of these things out my cupboard (yes the PDB not the PDB2K) and I have installed it on a T41p with XP (just what i happened to have lying on my desk) and the instructions I have given do work (a reboot is needed) - i now have a dvd drive working through PCMCIA with the PDB under XP so I would suggest trying it again - maybe try it on the other machine/pcmcia slot

The Drive is listed as Portable Drive Bay (PCMCIA) (Windows 2000) in device manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in device manager

[William Lueders]

Well I must have something wrong or off. I will clean out all of the effects from previous attempts and give it a go again.

Your instructions were (more or less) the steps I used initially to install. The only difference I can find is I indicated it was the "Drive Bay 2000" in my first attempt. That may have knocked the whole thing off. Hence the cleanout!

Thanks all for the help. I will report back on how this work. Cheers!

[William Lueders]

Here is the last post I made to the Thinkpad mail list:

All who responded:

No Pot Roast, no Sandwiches, nothing! It started working! Don't know why!

I removed all instances of any drivers from Device Manager, and looked in the INF Folder, but found nothing there that I could recognize. I then rebooted and set "System Restore" to roll me back to before I started playing with the Drive Bay.

Then I rebooted again, twice! Plugged in the Portable Drive Bay and waited for the install balloon to come up. Nothing happened for several seconds, then the screen blinked twice, then nothing. I looked at the system tray and there was a "Eject" icon. I clicked the icon in the system tray and it told me the Bay (with DVD in it, installed as G" ) was there and operating. And it was!!!

All worked as advertised. This was on the 570e where I wanted it in the first place. The only other difference was that I installed this time without the expansion base and on battery. The machine was clean without other attachments. Perhaps that was the secret!

Many thanks to Bruce (always a help), Matt (really good info), GMan (from thinkpads.com) and anyone else who chimed in. You all may not know how helpful you are and this list is. I for one couldn't get along without it. Even for simple stuff like this. For just this reason I ONLY use Thinkpads, and that is all I intend to use!!!!!

If I missed anyone that helped I appologize. I hate it when I can't figure out what is going on in the software but I love it when it all comes together. Thanks to all again! Bill.

[simbawang]

I have a portable drive bay, the one with only PCMCIA, connected to my transnote. I think there must be something wrong with the power-up and PNP and I always thought it is just mine.
Here is what I noticed. If I connect the PDB before turning on the laptop and press F12, wait until the drive power up (Orange light turn green) the drive works perfectly afterwards. However, if I plug it in after the computer is on, the light shows orange for a while and turn off. The drive is recognized by the Transnote but shows error and does not work.
I tried 4 different drive in my portable drive bay an ACER 24X CD-ROM, an IBM 6X DVD, an Hitachi DVD/CDRW combo, and an Toshiba DVD-RW/CD-RW that I am currently using now with all the same result.

[G-Man]

I think it's a common problem. I have PDB 2000 connected to my TransNote (had 2k, now XP), and it only works if I plug it in before I power up the TN. Not a big deal, but it's pretty annoying that you can't PnP it while the TN is on. I haven't tried with the USB yet. Probably that will work, since it's using its own power adapter.

Regards,
G-Man

[pennsyguy]

My expwerience with a portable drive bay is also similar. After many attempts. and failures it started working I am not sure what happened to allow it to work. I think going to the hardwae device manager and diabling and then enableing the deice listed as a pcmcia ide card under the scsi and raid controllers caused it to be recognized as such. The secondary ide controller is set to pio only. IOt does work The drive bay does work but I cannot tell how it was set up .As another writer stateed it just started.