Thinkpads Forum

Hello guys,
I got a big problem! During my bios update vista freezes and the update failed. After a restart my system will not start up. Only Battery and AC LEDs are turned on. Black screen and no bios screen.

Is there any possibility to get the old bios back without sending my thinkpad to ibm?

Had this exact problem, twice actually. My solution was to unplug the so-called bios battery. Tried again after several hours and it worked. Don't know the exact cause of this problem.

I dont think that this will work in my case. Even the bios does not start up. I think that the flashing failed.

if BIOS update failed the real consequence is that your motherboard will burn and won't be able to start up at all.

Try the battery thing - if it doesn't work you will need to send in your thinkpad for servicing.

fahim wrote:I dont think that this will work in my case. Even the bios does not start up. I think that the flashing failed.

I am afraid that I have little experience in meddling with the BIOS of a notebook. However, in the olden days (i.e. 7 years ago) when I built desktop computers I had to acquaint myself with recovery of BIOS IC’s that had been corrupted due to failed BIOS flashes.
I remember two ways to recover failed BIOS:es

THE EASY WAY – FORCED AUTOMATIC BIOS FLASH
When it came to BIOSes on desktop motherboards, some of them (e.g. Abit) had special recovery functions if a flash went wrong for some reason. If you messed up your BIOS so that you would not even get a BIOS post screen there was a way to re-flash the BIOS.

You needed to prepare a special floppy with the bios file renamed to a special name. You would insert the floppy in the drive and hold SHIFT + F1 (i think, i am not sure after 7 years) which would force the motherboard to execute a forced BIOS flash with the flash file on the floppy (if the flash file had the correct name). As the screen was blank during the entire process, you just had to wait and see that the computer actually was accessing the floppy and reading from it.

THE HARD WAY – HOTSWAP OF BIOS IC
The other way to recover from a failed flash was to find another computer, which had the same type of BIOS IC socket, as of the failed BIOS flash motherboard. You would then boot the other computer as usual. While the computer was running, you would remove the existing BIOS IC (this was quite tricky and involved prepping the BIOS IC by making a mini-handle around the IC using tape) and replace it with the failed BIOS IC. You would then use the running computer to flash the correct BIOS image onto your failed BIOS IC and could thereafter return it to your old motherboard.

There is a chance that the forced automatic BIOS flash could work with Lenovo’s stand-alone CD BIOS images (you need to do research). Hotswapping a notebook BIOS IC is probably not possible due to accessibility problems and the chip itself might be soldered onto the motherboard (which was not the case on desktop motherboards).

fahim wrote:I dont think that this will work in my case. Even the bios does not start up. I think that the flashing failed.

As I said, I had the EXACT same problem. Try unplugging the bios battery (and the main battery too, of course) and let the whole thing rest for several hours. I don't know why's that, but when I unplugged the bios bat and then plugged it back in right after that, it didn't work. It did, however, when the batteries were left unplugged for an extended period.

This has happened to me with 2 (!) bios updates, but when the computer starts up again, the new bios is there and working. Hope this helps.

I tried out to let the bios battery disconnected for some hours. But I do get still the same problem. I will try to boot from diskette and I am waiting now from a call from the technicals.

Thank you very much for your instructions.