laptop IDE 2,5'' hard disk replacement with msata SSD

My father's laptop was starting to suffer from a degrading hard disk.

Being an old IBM X31 using an IDE drive.

Nowadays new IDE 2.5" disk drives are sadly a thing of the past. Available disks are second hand drives from PC refusbishers on ebay or elsewhere. And quite so untrustworthy.

Not wanting to spend money for a new/used laptop I started searching online for possible solutions or replacement drives. I found some IDE 2.5" SSD drives which might have been the answer to my problem if they didn't have so bad reviews on Amazon.

And then I learned about msata drives. Along with them I learned about msata to IDE adapters.

Voilà the solution seemed obvious.

Get an ide to msata adaptor, an msata disk, and replace the ide disk.

In reality proved a bit more complicated though.

I had never successfully booted a PC from a USB drive and X31 doesn't have a CDROM drive. Not that it would help without a windows CDROM anyway.

Now had to actually connect the msata to ide adapter which proved a bit trickier...

Not wanting to spend much money, i bought the cheapest adapter possible on Ebay.

What I didn't realise at the time, was that this adapter is about half the length of a 2,5'' hard disk. That would be ok if the X31 had a fully opened hard disk bay, but unfortunately for me, the hard disk on that one slides and locks into position with only a tiny bit of the disk visible .

So how do you put something in there? The solution came unexpectedly from my gym membership.

the (credit card sized) card, was cut up as needed to extend the half length IDE card.

Then it was still tricky but doable to align the pins to the pinholes and insert the new hard disk in place.

care must be taken when inserting the New disk in position because the new Frankenstein disk has less pins than the original Hard disk.

And bellow the new disk is inserted in place.

Now that the hardware part was finished, the software part is equally important.

There are quite a few online resources claiming a variety of things about the use of SSDs with windows XP.

Rufus software was used initially to create a bootable USB drive, and then a full installable version of windows from an ISO file.

A little bit of tinkering with the bios settings later, the laptop was booting from the USB successfully!!!!

XP loaded without a problem, and quite fast I must admit.

The XP boot time was amazingly shorter with the SSD.

The RAM was also beefed up at the maximum 2GB and once it arrives a (rare) micro PCI wifi card with 802.11n will be added to increase internet speeds.

I disabled the pagefile, disabled the system restore, the hibernation. Supposedly there are a few registry tricks I could do, but for the time being I avoided them.

Also there is talk about using the trim function from a separate software, since windows XP doesn't support it. 

An Intel piece of software I tried to use, didn't seem to work with my Kingston msata drive and haven't searched so far or an OCZ software that is rumored to do the same job.

So far the upgrade seems to work. Will see how it holds in the future.

P.S. IBM Thinkpads have a predetermined list in the bios and can only use certain pre-approved wifi cards. How ever some smart guy, devised a way around it involving altering a bit of information, in the bios.

I had performed this procedure when I first got the Thinkpad, since the IBM approved cards were far too expensive compared with others not approved ones.

 UPDATE 22/9/16

I did the same trick with an elitebook 2730p that I got dirtcheap on eBay without HDD. THis time to replace an 1.8" data drive the appropriate msata to data adapter was used. The drive was partitioned with the help of a USB to msata adapter and windows 7 installed smootjly