IBM DHAA-2540 laptop hard drive common failure modes

Try to reseat all plugs first. Then apply power and carefully listen to the drive noises, does the disk spin as usual and does the head sound like it is attempting to read something repeatedly? Also trace the power rails on t he board, you may find fuses and voltage regulators. Do not open the disk cover as dust particles will ruin it.

If the drive sounds like it is spinning up and otherwie normal, then the problem is likely either the controller board on the drive is smoked or the controller on the motherboard is toast.

If you can acquire another drive of the same make and model, carefully exchange the PC boards. If the controller itself was bad, this may resolve the problem. I have successfully done this in the past to salvage data off of a "dead" drive.

Dan

That used to work, but the bad sector map and other information is stored in the flash memory on newer drives. He doesn't say if this is IDE or SATA or the size. I'm not going to look it up.

Drive is EIDE/PATA, 540 MB. A new drive would cost more than to buy another laptop at a rummage sale. The drive is so quiet that I can't tell if it is spinning. I have pulled and re-installed the drive. There is only one connector to the computer, and it seems fine. The hardware settings tool built in to the computer (Thinkpad

How old is that laptop? It looks like Win95 era.

I agree and would not expect to "use" the drive for any extended amount of time. I have successfully recovered the drive contents this way however, even with modern drives.

Dan

How large were they?

The last one I did was 250GB I think. Realize that I only recovered files over a single attempt. This was not a full disk recovery. Only files from a few folders were retrieved. I can't say whether or not this would work on any given rive, but it did work for me in this instance. YMMV.

Dan

Can you manipulate the drive while it is attached to your laptop? If if yo u can feel the gyroscopic torque while you move it, the spindle motor is pr obably running. If the actuator is seeking, you should be able to hear it with a stethoscope. If you are determined to get this computer going again , you can find lots of cheap (under $10) IDE laptop drives in eBay (larger capacity drives will probably work, but your computer may not recognize any thing above 2GB).

I would guess it's from the early '90s. If it ever ran Win95, it probably ran it pretty slowly.

When the drive is installed, it is nestled into the computer so that I can't get at it. No cable, just a caddy. I might try listening to it with the keyboard folded up, but there is a microswitch that I would have to hold down. I am not that determined, since I have other computers that I could use. It's just that this one is the only one that I have without Windows on it, and I like to use it with DOS to do some electronics experiments. I tried a 5.5 GB drive in its place, but the computer wouldn't even boot with that inside. A replacement drive under 2 GB might be hard to find. I saw some on Ebay for over $30, and that is too much to spend on this old thing.

DOSbox is a pretty good DOS emulator that runs under modern Windows. I don't know how good it is with programs that directly access the serial or parallel port, though, which might be important for your use. You can download DOSbox (open source) at

I have taken a bootable DOS floppy and turned it into a bootable CD-R before, so I could flash the BIOS on a machine without a working floppy drive. I don't know if anybody has ever made a bootable CD of full DOS, or if that's possible. You wouldn't have any persistent storage, though, unless you used a floppy disk, maybe a USB stick, an old parallel-port Iomega ZIP drive, or similar.

One of the modes of a classic CompactFlash card is to emulate an IDE interface. I don't remember if you need some "smarts" to put it in this mode (like a microcontroller that loads some configuration data into the CF card at startup) or if it's as simple as grounding or not grounding a pin on the CF interface. You do need an adapter to go from the CF connector to an IDE connector. I know you can get one that goes from CF to 40-pin IDE (what a 3.5" hard drive would use) that would fit in a 3.5" drive bay; you might be able to find one that would fit in the space of a 2.5" drive. In a quick Google, I see new 1 GB CF cards for $21 and 512 MB for $14 for decent brands. If you know somebody who's been into digital cameras for a long time, they may have an old CF card that they'll give you or sell cheap.

Alternatively, if there is a local e-waste recycling place, you might check to see if they sell (or give away) any parts. One of the ones near me fixes recent computers to resell, and also sells used parts cheap. Since 540 MB drives probably default to "recycle imeediately" these days, you might have to tell them what you want, wait a few weeks for some loads of stuff to process through, and then go and see what they've found.

Matt Roberds

I just figured out how to run the drive without the computer being completely assembled. It does spin up, but still is not recognized by the computer.

I now can check the controller board with the computer powered up. What test points should I examine?

I already have dosbox installed on my linux box. I don't use it because the old laptop is so convenient to put on the work bench and connect whatever I'm working on to one of the ports. Also, DOS will let me play with the ports directly, whereas linux and windows get in the way.

This laptop doesn't have any CD drive or USB/Flash ports.

E-waste in my area has to go to the local Goodwill facility. I've asked them about aquiring some leftovers, but was informed that that would be against the rules. Seems that no-one there has the authority to authorize it. :-)

Tech wannabe.

Are there PCMCIA slots? You can get a variety of CF flash cards and PCMCIA/CF adapters, so a 2GB SSD is possible, inexpensively. Many laptops with floppy drives can unplug the floppy and add another disk (hard drive, Zip disk, CD, DVD...).

A lot of larger drives had jumper options to reduce their apparent size, for just such situations as yours.

If you want to talk about HARD to replace, old Macintosh laptops used 2.5" SCSI laptop disk drives.

Is the actuator making noise long after the drive has been powered up? If so, I would suspect that the drive is bad. Even so, I would take my trusty IDE/SATA-to-USB adapter and see if the drive works (maybe on a different c omputer).

If the drive works, I would suspect your laptop. I would try unplugging an d re-seating the memory chips, and I would try installing a new CMOS batter y. Anything more elaborate is probably not economically wortthwhile (but i t could be a fun educational experience).

I couldn't hear any head movement clicks at all. I don't have any adapters that could connect to the drive.

The laptop will boot from floppy and run programs just fine. Only the hard drive is bolloxed.

There are a couple of PCMCIA slots, but I don't have any storage devices that will fit, and of course, I am trying not to spend any money on this thing, as I could replace the whole unit for 10 bucks at a rummage sale.

Not this one. It is from 1994. 80486 processor. Really, really old.

I'll have to look at the large drive I mentioned.

I could replace the whole drive, if I wanted to spend 50 bux on one, but my goal in this case, is to fix the old drive.

See the discussion at

The adapters are inexpensive (under $10 from cheap eBay sellers) and very useful for quickly and easily attaching a hard drive to a computer.