TOSHIBA 1.8" ZIF HDD Drive (MK6028GAL) not showing up

Out of curiosity I tried a Toshiba 1.8" ZIF drive (model MK6028GAL) in the A110 which I have - simply disconnecting the SSD ZIF cable and attaching
the drive with its own ZIF cable to see if it showed up in the BIOS - it doesn't

What is a bit puzzling is that the same drive and cable will happily show up (and boot) when put in a ZIF->IDE->USB adapter and attached to the Aspire, so neither the cable nor the drive are faulty. I was a bit reluctant to rip the SSD ZIF cable out and try the drive with that in case of damaging it, which is the obvious next thing to try.

Is the ZIF cable/connector on the Aspire One in any way non-standard?

I hadn't seen anything to that effect since people seem to have been sticking other ZIF drives in with success.

 

Success - the drive worked OK with the cable that came with the Aspire One, though I did manage to trigger the "BIOS brick" bug with all the stopping and starting and had to use fn+esc +usb stick to get it boot again. It is now running happily (though a little hotter) with Ubuntu/winXP on the hard drive.

 

I'm having a similar problem with a 30GB Toshiba 1.8" HDD that I just bought off eBay. I installed it using the existing ZIF cable in the Aspire One, but it won't show up in the BIOS. I was wondering how much of the top of the cable did you sand off in order for it to fit the Toshiba drive since the existing cable won't fit due to it's thickness (the blue plastic at the end of the cable makes it too thick). Also...a kinda stupid question...but which way did you insert the ZIF cable into the hard drive? The way I did it was...With the hard drive placed upside down so that the ZIF connector is facing me, I put the cable into the connector so that the little silver leads on the cable were facing me and the blue plastic that I sanded was facing down. Can anyone tell me if this was the correct way to install the cable?

 

Guys,

I'm thinking modding my AA1. Is this is the one i need. The 'ZIF' version!

I found this on eBay. Anyone got other recommendations?

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/1-8Toshiba-30GB- ... dZViewItem

Thanks guys.

 

I seem to remember this is the correct way to insert the cable. Did you check the cable was firmly secured and that you had lowered the little black lever that runs all the length of the connector?

 

>>I was wondering how much of the top of the cable did you sand off in order for it to fit the Toshiba drive since the existing cable won't fit
>>due to it's thickness (the blue plastic at the end of the cable makes it too thick)


I didn't have to sand off much to get the supplied cable to fit in the ZIF slot - I used a disposable nail file I pinched from my better half

 

Thanx for the replies guys! Ok, here's what happened....I was pretty pissed when I had installed my 30 GB Toshiba drive and 1GB RAM, and the hard drive WOULD NOT SHOW UP in BIOS! I'm very meticulous when it comes to opening up my stuff and modding Anywayz...I wrote that post asking for help and then went to sleep. The next day when I got home from work, I was all prepared to start taking apart the Aspire One again when something in my head was telling me to try to turn it on one last time...just to check for the hell of it if the hard drive was recognized. Well...IT WAS RECOGNIZED!!! No clue how that happened...I didn't do a thing! I had rebooted the laptop about 10 times the night before with no luck. The only bootable device that the Aspire One would try to boot from was the LAN adapter. Now I have a working, 30GB HD, 1.5GB RAM and TinyXP Rev09 installed Aspire One!
One other small problem I had that I'd like to bring up is that when I tried formatting the 30GB hard drive using the Windows Disc, it kept getting stuck at either 79% or 80%. I tried both NTFS and FAT32...both with the same result. After a few tries I decided to try the "quick" format option for NTFS and that worked perfectly. It finished formatting in like 1 minute and then Windows started to install. I'm thinking that the netbook may have possibly been overheating which could have caused the problem. I say this because the bottom on the Aspire One was EXTREMELY HOT during the long format process. I just hope it's not my hard drive that could possibly have some bad sectors or something.

In conclusion (sorry for the long post), I'm extremely pleased with the performance of the netbook with TinyXP Rev09. It's sleek and fast. I highly recommend upgrading the hard drive to one of these Toshiba ZIF drives...it makes a world of difference.