Rescuing a T43

[burns334]

I'm trying to rescue a T43 that our IT guys parted out as they upgraded employees to new machines. They removed the hard drives and sold the old ones at auction to the employees. Can I just get a replacement ATA drive and reinstall the OS from the original R&R disks using the COA number on the bottom of the unit?

[Harryc]

That would work just as you described, assuming the T43 is otherwise functional. The only caveat with a T43 and hard drives is that you will get a 2010 error on boot if you install a non-IBM FRU# hard drive. See this forum search for details.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/search.php?k ... mit=Search

...and in particular this thread -
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 2010+error

[burns334]

Harry, Is it as simple as "if the drive has an FRU number on it and is an ATA/IDE drive it is ok"? Or does it still have to be on the firmware update list?

[Harryc]

I'd stick with the firmware update list, but I'm sure others have gotten lucky with FRU's not on it. Maybe they'll reply here.

[RealBlackStuff]

Basically YES.
But there are some VERY RARE exceptions that are not on the (known) list, that will also work without Error 2010.
However, the Error 2010 only occurs at boot-time and does not interfere with operation otherwise.
Any PATA/ATA/IDE drive will work in a T43. It's just that some will have that infamous error.
I have some HDs that ARE on that list, but they still give that effing error.

One of these days, when I have nothing better to do, I'll look into disassembling that T43 whitelist.
Once found, all it needs is a jump-to-an-address-beyond-the-HD-test and maybe a new BIOS checksum for it to work.
It's unlikely that new BIOS versions for the T43/R52 will appear.