HP nc6000 - blast from the past

Good day to everyone -
This thing was marketed as a corporate laptop, so I think I'm in the right sub-forum.

IT dept. gave me an HP Compaq nc6000. Vintage roughly 2004. All batteries dead.

Figured I'd start with the RTC battery and see if it makes any sense to keep spending money.

The HDD appears to be ATA-6, a sort of mini-PATA? The HDD clips into a caddy. The caddy accepts the HDD, then plugs into the laptop motherboard via some other weird interface. I need to determine whether:

I'm stuck with the old ATA-6,
or maybe I can convert to a new SATA HDD.

Looks like I'd need to find out if HP ever made a caddy for this laptop that accepts a SATA HDD.

It appears that the Multi-bay can be used to drop another HDD in. Does anyone know if I can go SATA in the Multi-bay? Looks like I'll have to buy the correct gizmo that plugs into the Multi-bay

 

The RTC battery is probably a coin battery that you can find in a dollar store.

I believe you're stuck with the PATA interface for the main drive bay. The HDD caddy does not have any interface built-in, it just holds the HDD. The "weird interface" is probably just a plug adapter which contains no electronics.

There are adapter cards available to adapt the PATA interface to a SATA drive. I've bought one for about $6 from ebay to try out on an old T42 Thinkpad, unfortunately it will probably take another 2 weeks before I receive it from China so I can't tell you right now if it will work or not. I don't know if the adapter board will actually fit into the HDD bay, and if it does I expect the HDD will stick out too much and I won't be able to put the HDD cover back on.

Your other alternative, as you mentioned, is to use a SATA drive in the Multi-bay. There are SATA multi-bay caddies on ebay (search "nc6000 sata" without the quotes). If you can set your computer to boot from there, you should be good to go. On my T42, the lack of a HDD in the main bay causes the system to pause for minute or so when booting up, so I have to put something into the main bay.

 

Yes, you're right, I didn't think about it that way. There are, as you say, no electronics in the caddy's interface. It's simply transferring the ATA-6 pinout to an altered pinout that mates to the motherboard. It's still PATA.

When I went into BIOS there was an option to boot from the multi-bay. Looks like I can pick up a SATA HDD multi-bay caddy for about $15 via eBay. I have no idea if there would be a long pause such as you describe, but it looks like the multi-bay might be the best way to use a SATA drive, and avoid hanging on the precipice of obsolescence. Newegg still lists a handful of ATA-6 drives, but they're expensive and that list is bound to get shorter as time goes by.

I found some pretty good directions on the HP website. Used those directions to carefully dismantle the laptop, bagging the screws in separate ziploc baggies at each step and labeling them. For cryin out loud, the RTC battery was buried deep inside. There were very few things left to remove when I finally got to it. It is, as you say, a coin battery. A 2016. I ordered one via eBay this morning for a few bucks.

It looks like the leads are tack-welded to the coin battery. I don't understand how they do that without ruining the battery, but that's the common practice. I've never seen it any other way.

If I knew of a good way to attach the leads to a CR2016 I woulda pried them off the old battery and glued them to a new one. Do you have any suggestions for how to do that?