Thinkpad T42 HDD issue

I recently picked up a couple of T42 Thinkpads from the company and to be expected the HDDs were removed. I believe there should be some sort of housing the HDDs are screwed into that provides an easy way to insert and remove the drive, but that's missing as well. Looks like drives for these machines are getting harder to come by, but I stumbled upon a WD from Newegg here Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD800BEVE 80GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" PATA Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive. Upon inserting this drive without the housing I was hoping to at least see it recognized by the system, but it does not look that way. I popped in my Windows XP CD and it could not find the HDD at all. Any suggestions on this and where else I might be able to pick up a drive for this machine?

 

There is a metal frame for the drive but the drive should work without it. Before you put the drive in, stick a piece of tape on top of the drive so that the tape extends out from the slot when the drive is inserted. This will give you a handle to pull the drive out if necessary. Make sure you have the drive fully inserted and that it is correctly oriented -- my T42 is at home and I'm at work right now so I can't check, but if I recall correctly the circuit board side of the drive should be on top.

Edit: the metal frame and drive cover are available on ebay, search for "T42 caddy"

 

Thanks for the reply! I actually stuck the drive in before realizing that a caddy would have made the removal of the drive a lot easier. Luckily there's enough of a gap to stick packing tape over the drive to act as a tab to pull the drive out. Before purchasing a caddy my question is, would all PATA drives work in this machine? Not sure if the 80GB WD drive I purchased was defective or just incompatible...

 

Hard drives are pretty much plug and play. I think any PATA drive should work, assuming the hardware is not defective. You mentioned you bought a couple of T42s, have you tried the drive in the other machine?

If you get it running, the only possible issue I can think of is that the drive may not work with the Thinkpad APS (Active Protection System) software. If I recall correctly, most drives from the IDE/PATA era did not support the command to park the heads. I don't think this would be a show-stopper, but if there is any problem you could simply uninstall the APS application.

Edit: that should read "the command to park the heads without flushing the cache."

Edit 2: I just opened up my T42 last night so I can confirm that the circuit board side of the drive should face upwards when the computer is right side up. Also, I had forgotten that I had replaced the drive with a Seagate years ago. As I recall, only Fujitsu and Hitachi drives from that period supported the park without flushing command. Later drives from other manufacturers may support it as well. I don't know whether the Seagate supports it or not, but I have APS running and never had any problems so this may be a non-issue.