X60t bios

[Billaboard]

I've been cobbling together a bunch of X200's and X60's for friends and family and now need to sort out what I can make of the donor machines.

I started with an X60T running Mint 17, which I want to take back to XP,as it has the COA on the bottom. I thought I'd be quick and use a Macrium Reflect image from another machine, but it wouldn't boot from USB CD. Dug out a docking station and booted from the CD in that, but then it couldn't see the usb drive with the image file on.

The bios must be the problem, as all the settings are the same as another machine that works. It claims to be 1.15 and has a blank system serial number and a UUID which is just a bunch of zeros with occasional hyphens.

I've downloaded the latest bios CD iso from Lenovo, but it just says the bios is up to date and closes.

The question is whether I can somehow flash this back to a normal bios or even identify what it is.

[RealBlackStuff]

Its motherboard was replaced at one time, without the MTM and S/N and UUID being updated.
Do so with this program using the info from the sticker on the X60t bottom.
Then try again.

[Billaboard]

So far, that hasn't gone well.

The updater seems to be a Windows program, and the machine was running Linux Mint. So I've now installed from the docking station drive a Lenovo Win7 dvd that was to hand. This appears to be running fine except that if I plug usb sticks or HD's into any usb socket on the machine, it blue screens. Device Manager reports all USB hubs etc working correctly and there is the correct voltage on all usb sockets. My usb CD drive spins up, but does not appear in the boot menu.

While this could be a hardware fault, I still suspect a problem with the bios, so I'm back where I started.

I've run phcomp.exe and expanded the fl1 bios file hoping to run that directly using winphlash. It expands to a .flh file, which doesn't appear in the list of bios files known to winphlash.

Is this .flh file expected and likely to flash correctly, or have I missed some vital steps somewhere?

[RealBlackStuff]

That program gets extracted in c:\drivers.
Read the README and follow instructions!
You can either create a bootable floppy or a bootable USB-stick.
Nothing to do with Windows or Linux...

[Billaboard]

Yes, but the problem is that I can't boot anything from usb. The machine blue screens in Win7 when a usb stick is plugged in and won't boot from usb stick, CD or floppy.

I'm continuing to poke around, but was thinking that maybe I could bypass the restriction stopping installing the same bios by using Winflash directly with the .fl1 and 2 image files. Hence the question about what those files should expand into.

My apologies if I'm being terminally stupid with all this.

As I'm sure the machine would read memory sticks in Linux, I've been researching usb failures in Win 7. Updating wifi drivers was one suggestion. That hasn't worked.

[RealBlackStuff]

Go into BIOS, check that all devices are allowed in the boot-section, set USB-harddrive as first boot-item, remove HD/SSD and try to boot fom that USB-stick.
If no go, you have a bad USB-port or other hardware problem.

[Billaboard]

I suppose it may be a hardware problem.

I built the LENOVOBIOS usb stick on another machine and re-checked all the settings then tried to boot the X60T from it. Nothing. It boots in another machine fine.

With the HDD back in, X60T boots into Windows 7. When plugged in, this usb stick says it has malfunctioned, others just blue screen. I assume the difference is due to the different formatting of the sticks.

With the machine on the dock, it boots into a Mint 18 DVD, but via a bunch of usb error messages that mainly say something about "Unable to enumerate usb 1-6". However, if I insert the bootable usb stick, I can see the contents and read the text in the config.sys file.

My next move is probably to strip the machine of all plug in boards and see if that helps, as there seems no way that I can overwrite the bios with a known good same version.

[Billaboard]

Update: I've at last found an older bios for the machine and flashed that. The usb problem is still there, so I will have to strip the machine down sometime to see if I can locate the hardware problem.

Thanks to RealBlackstuff for all the great support throughout.