ThinkPad 380ED Hard Drive Replacement

[AlphaKilo470]

The 6gb hard drive in my ThinkPd 380ED is starting to show it's age and will need replacement probably within the year. I have a spare 20gb drive laying around, but I'm unsure if it will work porperly in my ThinkPad. Have anyone on this forum successfully intstalled a hard drive over 12gb into an older ThinkPad similar to mine and have it working to the full extent?

[MadeInJapan]

If my memory serves me right, as long as you use FAT32 and Windows98 or above you will be able to use the 20Gigs. Don't know if you'll be able to use recovery disc(s) to accomplish this...you might have to do a clean install of a Windows OS and then pick up the drivers after the install. Anyway, you could get an idea of if things will work or not by taking your current HDD out, installing the new HDD and booting up with a Windows98 boot disk and Fdisking your drive. See if it will see the entire 20Gigs.

If you do use your recovery disk, seems that Windows 95 is installed. You can go ahead and allow it to install, partitioning your HDD into several smaller partitions (2.1Gb is the max per partition for Win95) and then upgrade to Win98 (perferably SE) and then convert all partitions to FAT32, and then using Partition Magic or some other similar software merge the partitions into one large 20Gb partition. Anyway, good luck!

[AlphaKilo470]

I'll try your suggestion with the new OS and FAT32 either tonight or htis weekend. I have a retail cd with a full copy of Win98 SE on it that I'll try to install from. Thanks for the info.