IBM 760xl laptop hard disk

[skinst]

Can anyone tell me what hard drive i need to buy to upgrade from 1.2gig currently in it, is there a limit to the size i can install, How do i know which ones will physically fit in the machine any advice would be great.

cheers,

Skinst

 

[micker377]

I have an old Gateway Solo 2500 which had a IBM 2.1 gig Travelstar. I just put in a 30 gig drive, with no problems. I d/l all the Solo drivers before I started, just in case. I used a cloning program to copy everthing over. Since most laptop harddrives are built as drive0, and not switchable, I used a desktop, with adapters, put old drive on IDE 0 (as master) and new drive on IDE 1 (as master).

 

[tf1]

Any 3½" laptop HDD will fit and work. However, there is almost certainly a BIOS limitation on your laptop at 8.4GB: so gte the smallest drive you can find as anything over 8.4GB will be lost.

It may be worthwhile checking eBay and other sources for a 5 or 6GB drive as a replacement as you will be hard pressed to find anything smaller than 10 or maybe 20GB new.


Regards: tf1

 

[micker377]

tf1:
Do you know for sure about the BIOS on this system? As you can see from my post, there may not be a problem. I got the full 30gig on my unit. (Actually 27.8)

 

[tf1]

It is difficult to determine because to get into the downloads to see if there is a BIOS update (or even if one is needed) you need the exact model number. It is easiest to do this with the laptop as the IBM support site should recognise the laptop when it connects.

That said, I agree that it may be possible that it will accept a 20 or 30GB drive (there's another BIOS hang up at 28GB and it is unlikely to overcome that even with new BIOS). But the question begs; is it worth putting a 30GB drive into an old laptop that probably isn't capable of running applications that require that sort of disk space?

Regards: tf1

 

[micker377]

I agree with "is it worth it", but a new drive is < $100.00 and a new computer is > $1500.00, there may be no choice to the user.