I have a question about this.  Can you possibly post a link of the Hitachi IDE cable you got?  The only one I can find is the one that works with the original drive, and has the last poster mentioned, it’s the wrong one.  Not to mention it costs almost as much as the HDD itself!  About $80!  Is there perhaps a more reasonable priced one out there?

The Hitachi connector is the one you need.  That connector is the standard one for 3.5” drives (like I used in place of the optical drive).  Don’t use a toshiba 1.8” hard drive, they are slow and expensive for a big one.  Get the Hitachi cable I used and a standard sized laptop harddrive (3.5”).  You can get a bigger one that is faster for cheaper.

Hi MrBishi,

Reviving an old post here, but I have a couple of queries about how you connected this drive up. I got the drive last year (roundabout my last post on this topic!) but then went and broke my TR5MP by dropping it so it had been sat on my shelf for a while. Then I saw a TR1MP on ebay and picked it up very cheap as it was being sold as broken, so I took the screen, optical drive and plastics from the TR1 and combined them with the mobo and HDD of the TR5, getting back up to perfect working order again. However, after all that, I realised the problem with the TR1 was the primary RAM slot being broken (looks like some copper connectors are broken and out of the slot) so I put it together with the RAM in the second slot and it POSTed okay.

Now, my question is to do with the connection to the larger HDD: Since the TR1 came without a 1.8” drive I’m using the MK1032GAX as the primary drive, but the IDE cable (plugged into the primary IDE) leaves the four pins set apart from the main bank uncovered - is this the same as you found? Also, the main problem is that the drive is not recognised in the BIOS - would this be the reason for it?

Any help would be most appreciated!

Sorry for never replying to your post.  Did you ever get it sorted out?

No worries MrBishi - never bothered to fix it, though did have plans to take a 10GB drive from an old iPod to use on the primary IDE as the OS drive and have the large drive as the secondary, but needed that drive to replace one in another laptop that was failing.

Ah ok, sorry to hear that.  Let me know if you need help with it in the future.