Upgrading the hard drive of the T-3400



The 120 MB drive which came with my computer has turned out to be impractically small, so I've decided to upgrade. At this point in the game, I'm still working on finding a drive, and finding out about the process, but I'll keep this page updated, in case others find my experience useful.

At this stage, it'll be text only, but when I've actually purchased a new drive, I'll be taking pictures of the process, and detailing how it was all done. The pictures will be scanned in, if they look useful.


22 January, 1996 I went to a Toshiba-authorized repair center today to ask them about warrantees, and what their prices on drives were like. The basic (and unofficial) answers I got:

So far, what I've decided to do is get a 540 or 520 MB drive (since the 540 in my desktop formatted down to 520 anyway). Now, all that remains is the actual purchase, and installation.

One important point is how to transfer the data from the old drive to the new. I'd rather not re-install Slackware from scratch, since that seems like unnecessary work. I've put a message out on a local Linux newsgroup, asking for someone with some free time and disk space; hopefully, I can just stick an image of my disk onto someone else's computer, and re-copy it back when I'm finished. I know it won't be that easy, but it's the best idea I've had so far...

Keep an eye on this page, as it will be updated as events happen.

25 January, 1996 I decided that I should investigate the difficulty involved in opening up the computer (plus, I really wanted to see what was inside). I have now successfully opened and re-sealed the computer twice. The first time was for experimental reasons only, and the second time was to fix a loose connector I had left from the first time. (Oops)

Opening the computer up isn't very difficult, as long as you are careful. Taking out all the screws (11 in total, I believe) that hold the two halves together, it is necessary to further lever the pieces apart, due to the little tabs holding them together. The easiest way I found to do this was to swing the little feet at the back out, and use them as handles, gently pulling on them, and levering against the top of the rear IO port panel. Keep in mind that you probably want to have that panel open, since it bears on both sides of the case.

It was necessary to go round the edges of the case with a knife (in this case, the 'can opener' blade of a swiss army knife), and very carefully pry the pieces apart. In my case, the hardest tab to undo was the one right above the little power status light on the front left of the machine. I had to press fairly hard against that panel to get it unsprung.

I want to stress that you should not use too much force or you'll probably break something.

When you finally get the case halves separated, you'll find that there are three cables connecting them together. One is actually a great cluster of wires, and appears to be the screen's connection. The one a bit off center, but inward from that, appears to be the keyboard and indicator-light connector, and there's a cable on the far opposite side, which connects in some way to the hard drive.

The problem I ran into was that the keyboard cable came disconnected very easily. This isn't really bad, it's just something to look out for. It can be pushed back into place with a minimum of fuss. If you're actually looking at the inside of the computer, it's the flat ribbon cable in the middle of the case.

After the first time opening it up, I became gradually aware that the power and AC lights were flashing as I typed. This was really annoying, but more importantly, might have been a short circuit (it wasn't after all, but it had me worried). What had happened was that what I'm calling the keyboard cable had been pulled half-way out of its socket, and when i pressed even slightly on the keyboard (less pressure than necessary to engage a key), it would flex the cable, and presumably move the connector slightly out of place.

Re-seating the cable fixed the problem.

12 February, 1996 I've bought a drive, and it's arrived (after some hassle with shipping -- it was sent a week after I ordered it for some reason which wasn't explained to me). I decided to go for a 540 MB drive, on the theory that a plain IDE environment should be able to cope with the 520 MB it should format down to. The actual drive I bought is a Toshiba MK1924FCV 543 MB, 12ms, 5 V, .7A hard disk. I paid œ205 + œ37 VAT for the drive, and ordered it from Watford Electronics. If you decide to order anything from Watford, keep in mind that they were not very communicative with me (ie., didn't contact me at all after I had placed the order), delayed my order a week for no explicable reason, and (whether intentionally or not) tried to charge me œ10 more than their advertised price.

David Chow mailed me a few days ago, to say that he has a page up which details all his modifications to his T-3400. It's not very polished yet, but provides some good information, such as, for instance, that it's perfectly reasonable to use a drive larger than the 528 MB limit, if you keep your partitions smaller than 528 MB... He's currently using a 777 MB drive (I think) with great success. He's also running with a DX4-100, which is a bit more radical than i would get. Apparently it works fine, though...

I've made arrangements to do the data transfer on Wednesday, and will be posting much more then. Check back after Wednesday to see what happened.

February 16, 1996 I've installed the new drive, and what a difference! This drive (a Toshiba MK1924FCV as noted above) is orders of magnitude quieter than the old one. That was definitely the first thing I noticed: the 120 was so loud that i couldn't use the computer in class since the drive spinning down then up again was distracting people. Well, the new drive won't have that problem; I can't hear it right now, and the only noise in the room is fairly quiet music from a small portable stereo. Of course, I've also got a bit over 400 megs free now, which is a fairly liberating thought.

The actual installation was very painless. From a purely hardware standpoint, it was as easy as taking apart the two halves of the computer, unscrewing the old drive, and reconnecting the new drive. There were no real problems to speak of, but there are a few things I want to mention.

The first one is a brief description of the internals of the T-3400 as regards taking it apart. There are four cables between the two halves of the case, which I believe I can safely identify. I'll describe them from the vantage of the rear of the computer, sitting on its feet.

Once I had the two halves of the case separated, it was a fairly straightforward operation to unscrew the hard drive retaining cage from the case, and pull the drive assembly out. Once out of the computer, removing the drive from the cage was a matter of undoing three screws, and unplugging the connector from the drive. There's a clever little setup to get the signals from the drive to the motherboard, which is another flexible plastic sheet with conductors and a few components on it, which routes the signals across the necessary 2 inches. It is into this sheet that the HD light cable plugs.

Fitting the new drive was a very simple case of reversing everything that I had previously undone. The only thing I'd add to this is that it's fairly helpful to have a second person around to hold up half of the case when you're re-connecting the cables. Re-connecting the cables is completely straightforward, since plugging them in backwards would require that someone have not only the observational skills, but also the lack of common sense normally attributed to your basic eggplant.

Once I had the new drive fitted, I put the halves of the case together, without actually snapping it together, and powered it up, just to see that everything was really connected like it should be. Everything worked fine, so I snapped it shut and put all the screws back in.


At this point, it becomes necessary to talk about the software side of things, namely, the transfer of data. If you don't have anything on your old drive that you want to save (for instance, your cheezy Windows installation with loads of unregistered shareware games or something), you can safely skip this step, and get started installing your favorite distribution from floppies (a slow and occasionally annoying process).

First, let me say a few words about what you should have prepared beforehand. I used PLIP to transfer data, which is highly recommended. Or, if you have an Ethernet card and can find a networkable Linux PC to work with, even better. But before you start, you will in all circumstances want to have the following ready:

The method we ended up using (Stephen Tweedie volunteered to help me, and unless otherwise noted, 'we' means he and I) was to set up the PLIP connection, and create a tarfile of each of my partitions on his computer over the PLIP link. This was done with the following command (from the / directory):


tar czlf lucy:root.tar.gz /

In this case, lucy is his computer. This creates a compressed tarfile on the remote computer, of only one filesystem (the l option). The same command was reissued for the /usr partition, with the obvious modifications. The whole operation probably took half an hour to complete but this is highly dependent on your data-transfer method. Obviously, the slower your link, the longer it'll take.

Once the transfer was complete, we backed up my data to a QIC80 tape (might as well, since it was there), which took a fair whack of time. Then, once the data on the tape was verified, I went ahead and replaced the drive (described above).

Transferring the data back was interesting, but mostly because we weren't quite as prepared as we had hoped. It turned out that we were missing some vital utilities on our disk set, and that the kernel we were using had lp drivers compiled in (PLIP and lp can't exist at the same time). I suspect we spent about 2 hours getting the software and stuff right, including recompiling a kernel on his DX4-100.

The method we used to get the data back on the new drive was, I suspect, not the best one. This was mostly due to a lack of resources (floppy disks, in this case). We ended up transferring the two tarfiles back to what was to be my /usr partition with ftp, and unpacking them from there. This caused its own set of problems, mostly to do with permissions.

What you most likely want to do is to mount your / (root) partition on your ramdisk's /mnt (this is assuming you're using a ramdisk or something similar), and ftp the tarfiles to that partition. Then, using the tar utility that you carefully ensured was on your disk set, unpack root.tar.gz (or whatever you've called it). We used this command (from /mnt on the ramdisk):


tar xzvpf root.tar.gz

I hope at this point that you got a copy of your /etc/group and /etc/passwd files onto your disk set, since if you didn't you'll have a hell of a time getting permissions and ownership back to the way you had them. Note the p option with tar; this will make sure that permissions are as they should be.

Now, you should mount your /usr partition (on your hard drive) onto /mnt, as /mnt/usr, and do the same thing with usr.tar.gz that you did with root.tar.gz.

That, basically speaking, is how it should be done. How it is practically done, is, of course, never that simple. The best advice I can give you on that point is to make sure you're excited about spending an entire day staring at a unix command line, trying to figure out why the command that should do X is actually doing Y... If you're not motivated about this, you shouldn't be doing the upgrade yourself, you should be paying a professional to do it.

One final note: now that you've read through this whole messy document, I want to say that I'll be producing a much cleaner, easier to read page, which should contain the same information in a much more easily apprehended format. Look out for it soon...


This page was designed and implemented by Ian Johnston. Check out my homepage for a laugh...