$Id: hard-drive.html,v 1.1 1997/12/27 19:41:01 dgaudet Exp $
Note: I assume no responsibility for lost data or damages as a result of using the information on this page. You're on your own.
The Thinkpad 560 takes any 2.5", 12.5mm IDE hard drive. Folks have used models from Toshiba and IBM with success. I previously reported that hibernation didn't work with the Toshiba drives, but someone has stated they have it working. It could have been a BIOS issue. Note that these are slim drives, the more common models are 19mm tall, be careful what you order. I believe IBM announced availability of a 3Gb model in the 12.5mm form-factor.
For details on how to do the physical disassembly, and replacement you should just visit the hardware maintenance manual. It'd be foolish for me to reproduce the steps here.
The main details that I want to go over here are the re-installation of software on the new harddrive. Let me first say that there's no free win95 backup utility that I'm happy with, mind you I didn't look far. I decided just to blow away everything. I happen to have a win95 CDROM handy, so I chose not to make copies of any of the win95 disks from my original hard drive. You also don't need to make copies of any of the IBM Thinkpad disks because you can find them all online at IBM's website (I can't give an exact link because IBM keeps changing the links around).
Here's a roughly chronological order of steps:
Go visit IBM's site and download all the disk images related to the 560, and write them out to floppies. Or at least write out the pcmcia and three utility disks to floppies to begin with if you're short on floppies.
I installed RedHat Linux, so be sure to have the boot/root floppies handy.
I used an Adaptec PCMCIA SCSI adaptor, and some random SCSI CDROM. This was only for reading the win95 CDROM, as I have the RedHat installation available on my local net. To get at the net I have a 3COM 3C589 PCMCIA card.
Start by partitioning your disk using FDISK.EXE from the win95 install disk. I don't want to repeat all the gory details of how to partition >1Gb disks so that LILO is happy. The main thing you have to worry about is where you're going to stick LILO, and I usually choose to put a small swap partition under the 1Gb mark and stick it there. My partition table looks like this:
Disk /dev/hda: 128 heads, 63 sectors, 525 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1 127 512032+ 6 DOS 16-bit >=32M
/dev/hda2 128 128 254 512064 5 Extended
/dev/hda3 255 255 267 52416 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda4 268 268 525 1040256 83 Linux native
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(523, 127, 63) logical=(524, 127, 63)
/dev/hda5 128 128 254 512032+ 6 DOS 16-bit >=32M
The warning I'm not sure about, I probably should be worried. I don't seem to recall it being there before when I built the disk. Oh well. You'll notice I chose two ~500Mb DOS partitions, this is to avoid FAT16 cluster size lameness. You'll probably want to do this unless you want to burn disk (or unless you want to install FAT32, which would pose a whole new set of problems I don't want to get into here).
You can't make the linux partitions from DOS FDISK, just make the FAT partitions. I can't recall how I formatted those partitions, because I don't think the win95 install floppy has FORMAT.EXE on it. I seem to recall actually having a DOS 6.2 floppy handy... but if you don't have that handy you can try using mkfs under Linux after you get it going.
Install RedHat Linux. This should be a piece of cake, it has such nice PCMCIA support that I've never had a problem getting it onto the box.
You can now customize Linux if you want, but I suggest waiting
until you've got win95 done. The trick here is that win95 installation
from PCMCIA is a pain in the butt. But you can work around it given
the already installed Linux. Within Linux format the FAT partitions
if you have to, and then mount one of them (I chose the C: drive).
Insert the win95 CDROM, and copy the \WIN95 directory to
C:\WIN95. This is a small 34Mb directory that contains
absolutely everything you'll need to install win95. Later on when win95
is asking for the win95 CDROM just point it at C:\WIN95... no
CDROM required. In fact I keep these files around on my disk so that
whenever win95 decides it needs the CDROM I don't have to futz around.
Before rebooting, install LILO, make sure you can get back into Linux easily.
Reboot with the win95 installation floppy and install win95 using the files you've already copied to your local hard disk.
After win95 is done installing you can start feeding it the Thinkpad diskettes one by one.
Dig around on one of the utility disks for the PS2.EXE program, it's useful and isn't installed by default, so copy it over by hand. It's a non-graphical method of configuring your Thinkpad BIOS. In fact if you don't want to install win95 you can make a DOS boot floppy with PS2.EXE on it and be able to manipulate all of the BIOS settings. Normally you're expected to use the "Thinkpad Features" program under win95.
The win95 install will screw up LILO -- you'll need to use FDISK.EXE to set the active partition to wherever you installed LILO (in my case it's in the boot block of the tiny swap partition). Then you'll be able to get back into Linux, and can add the win95 partition as a LILO bootoption.