Thinkpads Forum

Thanks to a helpful and expert member of this forum, I was able to find a copy of the Hardware Maintenance Diskette version 1.86. It includes a program that is supposed to write the HMD to a bootable USB key. But whenever I use it, the resulting USB key doesn't show up in the Boot Device List on my ThinkPad X201s models. Other bootable USB keys (created by other programs) do show up on the list, and I've included all USB devices on the list of bootable devices in the BIOS.

Am I missing something obvious? Because I can't seem to create a usable USB stick of the Maintenance Diskette, I've used a USB floppy drive in order to boot to the diskette version. But it would be easier to have a USB stick.

The reason I want to do this, by the way, is that I've found some X201s motherboards (i5, not i7, but that's good enough for my purposes) on eBay, and I've swapped them in for the original motherboards on a couple of X200 systems. I need to use the HMD afterward to add UUID and system ID information.

Thanks for any advice.

Did you use the usbfmtpw.exe to create the key? Do not use use a prgramm like Rufus to do this.
And is it a USB 2.0 key?

wileE wrote:Did you use the usbfmtpw.exe to create the key? Do not use use a prgramm like Rufus to do this.
And is it a USB 2.0 key?

Yes to both questions. I followed the procedure in the Readme exactly.

It just occurred to me that the drives may be too large (all the ones I tried have 2 GB capacities); I'll try to find a low-capacity key and report back on whether it works.

EDIT: The smallest key I can find here is a 512MB model. I wrote the HMD to it, but it isn't recognized as a boot drive by the BIOS of my X200s and X201s.

IIRC I couldn't get it to boot until I used Rufus to format the USB drive and then ran usbfmtpw.exe
Can't explain why...

Used a 2gb card without problems.

Size does not matter. I use a 8GB key.
Does it have a drive letter assigned to it?

I finally got it to work, but in a very roundabout way. Here's a report:

When I format the key with Rufus (using either the FreeDOS or MS-DOS option), it shows up on the X200/201 boot list (and boots). When I format the key with Rufus, and then run usbfmtpw.exe, the key does NOT show up on the boot list.

So I tried formatting the key with Rufus (using the FreeDOS option), then copying on to the key everything from the Maintenance Diskette directory, including command.com (overwriting the command.com written to the key by Rufus). This worked!

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, and I hope this report is useful to someone else.