Thinkpads Forum

I have 2 or 3 thinkpads that i am considering altering the bios, preferably to a modded one with slic 2.1.
Unfortunately i am struggling to get anywhere at the moment. I have checked the bios mods website & received some links from the good people on here but im am still not getting anywhere. M i am just a bit dumb but could probably do with a bit of a walk through as on the bios mods site i see many differing methods & tools suggested.

Obviously techniques on here are thinkpad specific. I couldnt even work out if TP bios was phoenix or award etc
Ideally i would like to update my T400 & X200s from within windows but will consider dos or from usb flash if needed.
On my T400 I tried winplash as kindy suggested by TPFanatic & a bios link gratefully pointed to from RBS but for some reason it failed.

I am a newbie at this so obviously my heart was in my mouth when attempting anyway lol.

I recently obtained an x61s with a smashed screen (Thanks to My Hermes ) that i would now like to try again on 1st. So if anyone could provide assistance or tips on this that really would be most helpful. It would be great if it worked & Ive read a little about the middleton bios? I would certainly like to give it a try on this one. I am aware there is some risk but am obviously less bothered if it goes wrong on this machine.
Many Thanks

If at all possible, I would update the BIOS under DOS, not from within Windows. Even with a factory update, I believe that there is a higher possibility of something going wrong (i.e., ending up with a brick) when you update under Windows. The easiest DOS method would use a bootable CD as there's probably a better chance that one would have a CDROM drive, rather than a diskette. Flash drive can also work but some can be finicky to set up as a bootable media.

Once you have successfully updated the BIOS with a version containing the SLIC magic, there's not any easily visible means of telling by just looking at the BIOS menus, at least in my experience. About the only way you will know that the new BIOS update "took" is if you are updating from an earlier BIOS version. If your system is at the same version level as the one containing the SLIC table / whitelist, then you will not see any change in the BIOS version line. As far as I know, there are some software tools that you can use that will indicate the presence or version of SLIC that's in BIOS. Generally those run under Windows.

I believe that all Thinkpad BIOS is from Phoenix.

Many Thanks for your reply Ray. Not too familiar with dos? I take it you are talking about booting from dos & not running it from windows. What files would i need on a cd & also would i need use a program like img burn to make it bootable? Problem i may have experimenting on the old x61s is that because of smashed screen would need to hook up to external monitor (My TV). Now i can see the bios on the tv & windows but when i tried a bootable CD to test the ram using memtest it would not show on the TV only on screen but unreadable .
Any further tips would be appreciated