Retro laptop HDD

[aHumanError]

Hello there.

I recently picked up my first laptop I ever owned from my mothers house, it's a Compaq Armada 1510.

It works fine, but it doesn't have a HDD, or an optical drive and the battery is long dead. I thought I'd try to source some parts for it but I'm finding it difficult. Most of the parts I find are from later models, and I'm a bit unsure about the HDD.

It seems to be an old IDE interface and when I look I see that there are some 40GB drives on eBay but will those work with this machine? They seem a bit modern to me. Also, it sounds daft but I'm unsure which way round it goes in since it's universal, and I think the old HDD got broken from connecting it the wrong way as it's easily done.

If anyone knows about old laptops any help would be appreciated, or even any links to sites better suited for sourcing older parts.

Thanks.

 

[pete.i]

You need a 2.5 inch IDE (PATA) hard disk drive. Plenty on Ebay.

ide 2.5 inch hard drive in Internal Hard Disk Drives | eBay

What operating system are you going to install? that could be your biggest problem with no optical disk drive. It would seem that it came preinstalled with Windows 95 and it has a floppy disk drive so you would have to find a copy of Windows 95 on a set of 2.5 inch floppies. Windows 95 on floppies certainly did exist way way back so I suppose you could get hold of some now somewhere. Good luck with it, personally I don't think I would bother unless you really want to go retro.

 

[aHumanError]

If i recall, last time i installed Windows 95 on it i copied the setup files from the cd directly onto the hard drive. But i also have a PCMCIA network card that works with it too, and i have windows 98 running on a VM i could use for the network.

Id like to source a CDROM drive for it as it has a bay for one, only i imagine thats pretty rare.

So if i get, say, a 40gb drive that it would actually recognise that capacity?

 

[Dngrsone]

Hrm... I'm sitting on a few of PATA laptop drives right now...I haven't had time to plug them in and find out if they are still good or not. A couple have damage to pins from bouncing around in a box. You could get a slimmed-down Linux to run on that...Say Puppy or Mint lxde.