ThinkPad 600 and oversized hard drives \ VOGONS

ThinkPad 600 and oversized hard drives

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First post, by c0d3r3d

Posted on 2017-08-26, 21:30

c0d3r3d Offline

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Hey all,

Picked up a cheap ThinkPad 600 in...okay condition off eBay a little while ago. Fixed the 161, 163, 173 errors it was having with a nice fresh CMOS battery but now I can't actually get the thing to boot off the HDD.

The drive that came with the machine is toast - I plugged it into a spare PC and HDSentinel for DOS reported a <30% drive health with many, MANY bad sectors. So that's out. I have a nice 100% IBM Portable Deathstar drive that I popped in there, and while the system detects it (and even passes when you perform a hard drive test), no matter what OS I use I can't get it to have any partition changes persist.

I booted up an XP CD to see what was going on, since 98SE wasn't showing me anything useful. The drive is reported as 8GB, which is already wrong, and no matter how many times I make a partition of any size, it just flatly refuses to make the change. The hard drive makes little skittering noises as if it's doing so, but nothing changes on screen.

I have tried MANY different overlays, OnTrack 9 (IBM OEM), Ontrack 4, and Maxblast, and only ONCE did it ever boot off the drive. After I removed the drive to copy over the 98SE files, it stopped booting from it again (it always throws an i9990302 error). Whenever I run one of the overlay programs off the ThinkPad, the firmware name of the HDD is always corrupt. I can never successfully install a drive overlay on that system - I have to do it on another and then transplant it.

At this point I'm not sure if the IDE controller is faulty or if there's absolutely no way I can get the 20GB drive to run on it (despite people saying they've done it before). Is there anything else I can try before throwing in the towel and getting a small CF/SD card or 6.4GB HDD? The BIOS is on the latest revision. I have a 527MB HDD out of an old Toshiba Satellite 100CS, but that thing just makes horrible grindy noises and halts the BIOS so that thing's long past dead.

Thanks for your help,
Aidan.

Reply 1 of 6, by nforce4max

Posted on 2017-08-26, 21:43

nforce4max Offline

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I've only used CF cards in my Thinkpad 600 because it suited my needs better but it might be your best option without the headache, I did change out the original CD drive for a ide DVD drive from a Dell and it works though it kinda pokes out.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 2 of 6, by c0d3r3d

Posted on 2017-08-26, 23:06

c0d3r3d Offline

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nforce4max wrote:
I've only used CF cards in my Thinkpad 600 because it suited my needs better but it might be your best option without the headache, I did change out the original CD drive for a ide DVD drive from a Dell and it works though it kinda pokes out.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of doing. I have a 5GB Seagate MicroDrive I could test it with but I don't have an adapter to plug the actual card in. As for the CD drive - the original one doesn't read CD-RWs at all which is a big pain for me since I dislike using CDRs to test/install OSes with. I just prefer to have a couple RWs lying around that I can swap in and out. For that purpose, I just borrowed the DVDRW drive out of my HP 6710b and that worked fine, so I'm fairly certain the IDE controller is OK.

I hope. I'm not going to be booting Windows off a USB 1.0 port that's for sure 🤣

Reply 3 of 6, by SW-SSG

Posted on 2017-08-26, 23:49

SW-SSG Offline

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You may have already attempted this, but... have you tried making a ~2GB partition (clean FAT32; no overlays) on the HDD on another computer, then inserting the HDD and trying to install an OS on the partition (without changing the partition, except maybe to set it to Active)?

Reply 4 of 6, by c0d3r3d

Posted on 2017-08-30, 19:11

c0d3r3d Offline

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SW-SSG wrote:
You may have already attempted this, but... have you tried making a ~2GB partition (clean FAT32; no overlays) on the HDD on another computer, then inserting the HDD and trying to install an OS on the partition (without changing the partition, except maybe to set it to Active)?

Just tried that now with the same drive and everything. Formatted it to a 500MB partition (with /S) on my Sony VAIO, transplanted the drive. Same I9990302 error. I get paid tomorrow so I'll order a 8GB CF card and an adapter, and report back if that works. If it doesn't...then it looks like the primary IDE controller is screwed.

Reply 5 of 6, by oeuvre

Posted on 2017-08-31, 21:40

oeuvre Offline

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Man, I wish I could find a ThinkPad 600. That's the one ThinkPad I've wanted to own but haven;t yet.

HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7

Reply 6 of 6, by c0d3r3d

Posted on 2017-09-01, 21:26

c0d3r3d Offline

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Joined: 2016-04-10, 14:51

oeuvre wrote:
Man, I wish I could find a ThinkPad 600. That's the one ThinkPad I've wanted to own but haven;t yet.

They're super nice. The only thing is that mine has a minor case of rubber casing deterioration, which is a shame. It also has an extremely strong smell of "old garage". The hinge is super loose on mine (and if you unscrew the wrist rest, the hinge barely has any resistance to it at all) but I got it super cheap and it (mostly) works, which is all I care about 😜

The 2MB video card is a bit...crap, but oh well. I have ordered an 8GB CF card and CF-IDE adapter and it'll arrive tomorrow (Saturday), so I'm pretty excited to see if it'll work.

EDIT 2/9/17: So, the kit's arrived. Plugged in the adapter (which was hard to do since the pins push into the case and pull the board up slightly), plugged in my 8GB CF card, ran 98 setup. No disks found. Turned it off, replaced it with my 5GB MicroDrive. System turns on, then a bad smell enters the air. I frantically turn off my ThinkPad, pull the adapter out, and there's a nice melted point in the case and a burned adapter in my hand. So...back to the drawing board I guess. Going to send that back and order one of those dual slot ones since it fits more like an actual hard drive and not a teeny little board sitting half a mile into the case somewhere.

My ThinkPad still recognises hard drives and CDs, thank f!ck.

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