Can I connect a 3.5" drive to my T20 ?

[loopiloo]

Hi , I just bought an old T20 that I'm thinking of renovating , and have a question . There is no hard drive installed , and although I have XP on an available 3.5" hard drive I cannot boot from USB on this model . I'd like to confirm the computer is working before investing in a new harddrive and extra RAM . However I know it is possible to buy adapter cables to connect a 2.5" drive to a desktop 3.5" drive socket in order to transfer data easily , but my question is , can I do that in reverse? The cable will carry the power as well if I want it to , although it might be better to supply the 3.5" drive with its own power. Is there any reason why a drive connected like this would refuse to be seen by the Thinkpad ?
To clarify - can I connect a 3.5" drive with bootable XP on it , via a cable to the internal hard drive socket on the Thinkpad ?
Both drives being IDE of course.

[dr_st]

Does the T20 have a CD drive? Get any modern Linux LiveCD (probably not LiveDVD, unless the T20's drive can read DVDs) and boot from that.

Aside from the inconvenience of getting an adapter to connect the 3.5" drive to the laptop, and supplying it with power via an external molex connector, the chances of a random XP installation to successfully boot in another machine are close to nil.

[RealBlackStuff]

You may also want to burn a CD from this PC-Doctor .ISO http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 44#p529644
With that you can test all aspects of your T20.

[EasyMac308]

It's probably not worth the headache, *but*... depending on the adapter, you can sometimes get away with using the same 2.5" -> 3.5" PATA adapter you would use to put a laptop drive in a desktop system, but you must supply the 3.5" drive with outside power (usually from a PC supply).

The best thing to do if you just want to check out the system would be to use a live CD as the other posters suggested. I would suggest Hiren's Boot CD, D***SmallLinux, or Puppy Linux.