Hard Drive Module

Hard Drive Module

The same hard drive module is used in many MP-975, MP-978 plus TravelPro 100, T.P. 1950, TP2000 and TP2500 series of machines. Many eBay machines are sold without a hard drive and often the seller just removed the module - so do ask before you bid on an eBay "parts" machine.

Close up of the top and bottom side of the hard drive module. Note the three small screws holding the metal plate to the plastic part. Remove them and you see:

This is what you'll see inside. The black plastic part on the right is an optional spacer plate. The hard drive assembly is deep enough to take all 2.5" hard drives. Thinner hard drive require a spacer to keep the hard drive from bouncing around inside. If you need a spacer for the new hard drive - I can supply them or just use some cardboard.

Gently remove the hard drive and it's plastic housing from the bottom plate and disconnect the hard drive from the connector. The connector is an insulation displacement (IPC) type and make sure you don't try pull the ribbon cable out of the connector. The connector mates up with 44 pin on the hard drive.

Here's the hard drive next to the plastic frame and you can see the hard drive pins and the connector. Note this hard drive has some extra pins to the right side of the 44 pins. These extra pins are a set of 5 volts pins and a Slave/Master jumper. Normally you need not jumper these pins. Some early hard drives might have jumper in place - leave them be!

Now it's just a matter of installing the new hard drive and reassembling the pieces.

Do make sure that you are matching pin one on the connector with pin one on the hard drive. You will note that the connector and the hard drive pins are offset to one side. If they don't line up - you've got the hard drive upside down. Also, make sure that both sets of pins are in the connector. It's easy to plug the connector one row off.

Before you try to install a new hard drive be aware that you will need to disk and format the new drive. If the drive is much larger than 4 gig's in size you might have to run a special format program and you might need to install a BIOS overlay program so that the TravelPro BIOS sees the complete hard drive size. I'll expand on this in the future.

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