Thinkpad 560 hard drive bracket

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Severian · #1 Post by **Severian** » Fri May 21, 2004 6:09 pm

Howdy,
On Bill's web site, he offers a replacement drive bracket for a ThinkPad 560. The bracket pictured has mounting holes for both drive mounting positions that are common. Is that bracket the kind that the 560 had to begin with, or is that an improved aftermarket model, like his 701 caddies? The 560 came out around the time that IBM was making the transition, so either kind would not surprise me.

I plan to upgrade the drive in my 560. I understand the 560 is worse than average to take apart, so I hesitate to take it apart just to answer that question. Most drives I could find now have the wide mount spacing. If the standard 560 bracket had the wide spacing only. that would be OK too.
Good day,

James · #2 Post by **James** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 4:29 pm

The 560 has around 16 screws holding it together,, be careful taking the palmrest/keyboard bezel of, it is a bit tricky on the left hand side at the fdd port.
The HDD bracket, I haven't seen the bracket you describe, but is fairly straight forward to remove,

good luck

Severian · #3 Post by **Severian** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 5:06 pm

James wrote:The 560 has around 16 screws holding it together,,.
The HDD bracket, I haven't seen the bracket you describe,

Howdy,
I was referring to the bracket pictured on the thinkpads.com site. The picture is at:
http://www.thinkpads.com/TP560.jpg

Notice how this bracket can support newer hard drives, which have mounting holes near the ends of the drive. It also has mounting holes to support the old mounting holes that IBM and a few used to use where there are two holes in the bracket fairly near the center. Almost any drive you buy now days will use the further apart pair of holes. I was asking whether the bracket pictured is likely to be the same bracket in my 560 or whether this is an improved replacement.

The hardware maintenance manual for the 560 also says you should throw away the old screws when you take it apart and put in new ones. I bet those are easy to find. I suspect I will have to muddle through with reusing the old ones.

Thank you for the advice. I won't be doing the upgrade right away, because I still have to come up with a cheap, good hard drive. In the mean time, I installed Plan 9 on the 560 and it seems happy with 32 meg and 1.4 gig. Not much runs under Plan 9, but enough does to learn a bit.
Good day,