Interesting 60gig Hitachi drive

John30_06

2008-10-14, 19:01 #1

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Subject: Interesting 60gig Hitachi drive

And $149's a very good price if you can hack the caddy thingy off. I wish they had more details, size-wise.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Hitachi-1-8-60GB-IBM-X40-HDD…?hash=i…

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/docum…?sitest…

[Image: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/69154_hddconnecterview.gif]

[Image: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/69154_hddconnecterview.gif]

This post was edited on 2008-10-14, 19:02 by John30_06.

M0tah 2008-10-15, 21:07 #2

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Nice find! I googled a bit and found this thread, which discusses the drives and the adapter/cage. The last post has detailed pictures of it along with a guide on how to take the cage apart. It would be good if we could find someone who just sells the ZIF->IDE adapter cable, as then people could use the ZIF drive of their choice.

From the pictures in that post it looks like the ZIF drives would fit in the original HDD's space using that adapter cable, assuming a single platter 5 mm high drive was used and not a double platter, 8 mm high one.

John30_06

2008-10-16, 06:17 #3

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Nice find yourself! From the last frame it does look like a single platter drive, whose thickness would be ~ 7mm, same as the original 20gig stock drives.

Notice one of the posters links back to your tute on this forum? :-p

http://forum.thinkpads.com/posting.…?mode=quote&p=40…

gomtuu 2009-01-05, 13:52 #4

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I think I'm about to break down and buy one of these on eBay... Sigh...

gomtuu 2009-01-07, 07:58 #5

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I was looking around on rapidrepair.com and found these interesting parts:

http://www.rapidrepair.com/shop/1225-ide-hd-cable-2g.html
http://www.rapidrepair.com/shop/1525-ide-cable.html

They're not exactly like the cable in the Lenovo drive adapter, but they're pretty similar... They have a 44-pin IDE connector on one end and a 40-pin connector on the other end. The 40-pin end looks wider than our 1.8" ZIF connector, though, and possibly fatter, too. I wonder if it's pin-compatible with 1.8" ZIF?

M0tah 2009-01-07, 13:21 #6

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It looks like the pin pitch on the non-ZIF end of the cables is smaller than a standard 44 pin laptop IDE interface, so I doubt these would work with the Karma's HDD connector.

gomtuu 2009-01-07, 18:16 #7

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Quote by M0tah:
It looks like the pin pitch on the non-ZIF end of the cables is smaller than a standard 44 pin laptop IDE interface, so I doubt these would work with the Karma's HDD connector.

I think you're right again, M0tah. The replacement hard drives that rapidrepair.com lists for the iPod Photo look like the drive on the left side of this page. So the iPod Photo's 1.8" drives do have a smaller IDE connector.

That might actually be good news, though, because it could mean that the ZIF end is the right size. It might be easier to expand the IDE end somehow (that is, somehow other than by using one of these, which is too bulky) than to reduce the ZIF end...

This post was edited on 2009-01-07, 18:25 by gomtuu.

gomtuu 2009-01-12, 10:57 #8

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Has anyone successfully used one of these Lenovo drives yet? Mine just arrived, and I was able to disassemble the cage and disconnect the hard drive from the ZIF end of the IDE-to-ZIF adapter, but the IDE end is still attached (glued, I guess) to a fairly large piece of the cage. I'm not sure yet how much of a problem that will be because I haven't gotten the adapter and the Karma in the same room yet. I'm thinking I'll either have to cut away the extra metal (not sure how much) or peel the adapter off of it somehow.

I'll post photos when I get home.

Edit: I was able to separate the adapter from the metal plate it was glued to by working a glossy business card between them. Still not home yet, so no photos and no Karma results yet.

This post was edited on 2009-01-12, 15:27 by gomtuu.

gomtuu 2009-01-12, 20:35 #9

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So far, I have some good news and some bad news...

The good news is that the Lenovo IDE-to-ZIF adapter seems to work great. It fits inside the Karma and leaves room for a hard drive (Probably either 5mm or 7mm) and the stock battery without modding the case. The ZIF end of the adapter fits easily into the Hitachi 60GB drive that comes with the adapter (of course), and after Dremeling off a little bit of the reinforcement backing, it fits into the Toshiba 120GB drive, too. When I boot into Recovery Mode, the Karma is able to ID both drives.

The bad news is that the 120GB drive doesn't work past that point. With the 60GB drive, I can run the firmware updater and format the drive, and the Karma shows up in Rio Music Manager (even in Recovery Mode). With the 120GB drive, though, the firmware updater fails when I try to apply the update. It lets me choose the Karma, and I click "Also format" and then Next, and it shows an empty progress bar and says, "Now updating," but then it says "The upgrade was unsuccessful. A device attached to the system is not functioning." Also, the Karma never shows up in Rio Music Manager, even when I have a tray icon saying the Karma is plugged in...

So I don't know if this drive is just bad, or maybe it's too big and it's confusing the Karma... Anybody have any ideas?

PS - I noticed that the Toshiba MK1231GAL (120GB) is quite a bit quieter than the Hitachi C4K60 (60GB).

This post was edited on 2009-01-12, 20:43 by gomtuu.

straycat 2009-01-13, 06:19 #10

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thanks for testing this, gomtuu.
have you tried to flash the fw without formatting?
if it works you can always try to format it with sveta or an old version of realplayer which supports the karma.

gomtuu 2009-01-13, 07:12 #11

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Quote by straycat:
thanks for testing this, gomtuu.
have you tried to flash the fw without formatting?
if it works you can always try to format it with sveta or an old version of realplayer which supports the karma.

I did try leaving the format checkbox unchecked. When I did that, it still failed, but it gave a different error message. I don't remember exactly what it was, but there was an error code like 000400ba or something. Didn't find any results for it on Google.

I would like to try other ways of formatting the drive... It's possible that the main problem is with the firmware updater itself (or the combination of that and Recovery Mode), so once the drive is formatted, it might work.

straycat 2009-01-13, 08:24 #12

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workin right now, when i get home i can upload the sveta and rp for you to try.
maybe peter or ukre know about the error code.
m0tah proved that the karma supports 80gb. if the 120gb doesn't work i think we'll have to settle for 80 as the maximum capacity.

peter 2009-01-13, 09:02 #13

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In reply to post #9

Quote by gomtuu:
So I don't know if this drive is just bad, or maybe it's too big and it's confusing the Karma... Anybody have any ideas?

Unfortunately nobody now has access to the diagnostic tools that would be needed to even start debugging this. It's altogether possible (though would be a bit of a shame) that the Karma either times out for some reason on drives that big, or even that the formatter has a bug that only affects big drives.

One possible line of inquiry would be to format the 60Gb drive in a Karma, take it out, attach it to a Linux PC (2.6.27 or later, with CONFIG_USB_STORAGE_KARMA and CONFIG_KARMA_PARTITION) somehow, copy ("dd") its entire contents, specifically the first partition and the firmware partition, onto the 120Gb drive. That won't, of course, give you a 120Gb Karma, only one which thinks it's 60Gb -- but it would at least verify that the actual 120Gb drive hardware works with Karma.

If that worked, you could then look into fiddling with the music partition to make it span the whole drive. You'd need at least mkomfs from http://bobcopeland.com/karma/, and probably some of the other stuff.

Peter

gomtuu 2009-01-13, 10:05 #14

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Quote by peter:
It's altogether possible (though would be a bit of a shame) that the Karma either times out for some reason on drives that big, or even that the formatter has a bug that only affects big drives.

If it is a timeout, it's pretty quick. The firmware updater only waits a few seconds before giving up and showing the error message.

Quote by peter:
One possible line of inquiry would be to format the 60Gb drive in a Karma, take it out, attach it to a Linux PC (2.6.27 or later, with CONFIG_USB_STORAGE_KARMA and CONFIG_KARMA_PARTITION) somehow, copy ("dd") its entire contents, specifically the first partition and the firmware partition, onto the 120Gb drive. That won't, of course, give you a 120Gb Karma, only one which thinks it's 60Gb -- but it would at least verify that the actual 120Gb drive hardware works with Karma.

If that worked, you could then look into fiddling with the music partition to make it span the whole drive. You'd need at least mkomfs from http://bobcopeland.com/karma/, and probably some of the other stuff.

I wondered about that... Cool, thanks for the tip. I'll try that if I can't get sveta to format it.

peter 2009-01-13, 10:29 #15

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Quote by gomtuu:
I wondered about that... Cool, thanks for the tip.

I should hastily add that I've never tried any of that. But it ought to work.

I'll try that if I can't get sveta to format it.

I'm pretty sure that only the firmware updater itself, can format a drive that hasn't already had a successful firmware install.

Peter