240X & Travelstar

[aldaden]

Hi everyone

I have an old 240X running Windows 2K. the hard drive has always been noisy but recently it's gotten even louder and I'm a bit concerned that it might be on the way out.

Unfortunately I know nothing about hard drives.
'Travelstar' - what is that? A brand name? The type of drive?

I'm not sure what I should be looking at when looking for a replacement - Only 'Travlestars? A specific type of Travelstar?

Are there any size limitations? - It has an 11GB right now.

Any help greatly appreciated

[rkawakami]

Travelstar = IBM (now Hitachi) mobile (i.e. laptop) hard disk drive. You can substitute any 2.5" hard drive following whatever interface standard your laptop uses. In your case, the 240X should be using parallel ATA, sometimes known as EIDE. I'd say that any recent vintage disk drive that says it's PATA, EIDE, Ultra DMA/33 or PIO Mode 4 (did I leave any out?) compatible will work.

I wouldn't think that there would be any practical size limitation, but I'd check with IBM's site to see if you have the latest BIOS revision. That information is available here:

BIOS file matrix

You can try searching around the archives here to see what other people have used or just sit tight and maybe someone else will come along and add to the thread.

(edit: P.S. Welcome to thinkpads.com!)

[aldaden]

Many thanks for your help.

I just remembered I still had SIW installed and I ran it through to see what I actually have right now if that's of any extra importance:

Code: Select all

Property	Value
Type	Fixed hard disk media
Vendor	IBM
Model	IBM-DARA-212000
Interface	IDE ATA
Revision	AR4OA51A
Size	12 GBytes
Removable	No
Location	Primary Controller - Master drive
Controller Buffer Size on Drive	418 KBytes
Capabilities	DMA, LBA, IORDY_Disable, IORDY
PIO Mode Support	0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4
DMA SW Mode Support	Not Supported
DMA MW Mode Support	0 - 1 - 2
UDMA Mode Support	0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 (ATA/66)
Current UDMA mode	None
SMART Support	Yes

One more question if anyone knows-
When I first got it I took an Acronis image of the drive (Norton's Ghost threw up a warning about something - probably needing more RAM)

Would I have problems putting the image on a larger drive? I've never used an image on a different drive that it was taken from before

Thanks again

[soyabean]

The 240 with the latest bios will accept pretty much any 9.5mm IDE drive. Remember your objective is to get the computer working again, so don't discriminate for original 'Travelstar' drives, take whatever you can get. A huge surplus of 10/20/30/40Gb drives out there, everyone is upgrading. tImage away and have fun.