Thinkpads Forum

Alright so i recently got an old IBM 560x from a family member. Booted with no errors (except for 161) however when i went to the testing utility in the "bios" the HDD went kaput. I took it out and no other system recognizes it and it makes a horrible scratching and ticking sound so i recognized that as the issue. i ordered a sata disk to IDE host adapter and am planning to use a 40gb fujitsu hdd as those are known to work. I don't have the FDD external drive nor any PCMCIA cards. I have no idea ho to get an OS to boot. I don't think it supports USB booting, My only idea is to format the main drive on another computer but have no idea if it would work let alone on how to go about it.

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I doubt the 560X will boot from anything else (easily). Maybe PCMCIA or a dock.

I wouldn't assume a SATA to IDE adaptor will work and also will it fit in the drive bay? If I were you, I'd pick up a cheap 2.5" drive from ebay or aliexpress - £20 and just use that because it'll definitely work.

Fitment is not an issue ive already done a test fit the drive and adapter should fit, I wanted to get around buying the external FDD bay.
https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installa ... -ROM_drive
Here it says it is possible however id need to install Dos using the FDD bay. a follow up question is if i can install dos directly from another pc onto the hdd.

If you have another thinkpad of the same era, with a FDD, then it might work to rebuild the MBR/paritions on that but anyhting else is just chance. Mostly, I've found it won't work.

I would suck it up and get an IBM FDD as you can use it on virtually all thinkpads of that era. Really a working FDD is the key to restoring nearly every machine of this era which will not generally happily boot without a HDD from anything else.

So just get a 6.22 or Win98SE boot floppy, boot on it, FDISK it with a new active partition, format /s to format and copy over boot system files and then check the HDD boots. Then remove and copy everything you need over and then go in on the 560 and you're away.

I realize that this is too old to help the OP, but might help others.

The 560x will happily boot from a CF card in a CF->PCMCIA adapter if configured in the BIOS to boot from PCMCIA.

I boot from the CF card, format the hard-disk with system files, copy the Win98 install and drivers from the CF card onto the hard drive.

Then I can boot from the hard-disk and run the Win98 installs.

This way you can install without external floppy or CD drive...

Something odd that I have seen with a 2GB CF card on the 560X is that in Win98SE fdisk thinks the CF card is only 460MB in size, but if I boot from the CF card and run fdisk then it sees the full 2GB.