[ltp] Old Thinkpad 380E won't boot from cdrom if harddrive connected!

[Richard Neill]

Dear Keith,

Good luck with that machine - I think you'll have some "fun" getting it 
to work. Your problem sounds to me like a master/slave conflict.

If you have a single IDE channel, this can normally support up to 2 
devices, one of which must be the master, and the 2nd (if present) the 
slave. It doesn't usually matter which is which (though there are some 
issues about sharing a bus between 33 and 66 MHz IDE devices, IIRC.

Sometimes the master/slave setting is done by a jumper on the disk, 
sometimes it is by a specially wired cable, aka "cable select". I hope 
that's helpful.

Are the CDROM and HDD original parts? If so, they should be compatible 
with each other.

Also, have you considered placing the hard disk in a USB enclosure, and 
installing from another machine?

Also, a possible warning: not all "PCMCIA" cards are compatible. The 
page here is helpful: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/PCMCIA_slot

Lastly, this may be a useful testing tool:
http://www.toms.net/rb/


HTH,

Richard


On 13/07/14 20:52, keitho@strucktower.com wrote:
>
> Turns out that it won't boot from a cdrom unless the harddrive is
> disconnected. I wonder if anyone can give me some clues as to how to fix
> that?
>
> If I remove the harddrive it will boot from the cdrom.
>
> The hard drive interface is the old ATA/100 44-pin style.