Thinkpads Forum

Hi, i have come over an nice Transnote computer with all manuals and stuff, it has been used very little according to the seller.
I have not received it yet but i have some questions.

What Maintenance shall i do when it arrive ? I have read that the bios battery and sub battery is prone to fail so i will replace them asap but is it something else i shall do in prevention cause?
I have also heard that the EEPROM can fail, can i do a backup for the bios file if it fails later on so i can re-flash it if it happens? Is it any more well known fault with this machine i can prevent?

I want this puppy to live for many years And i going to upgrade the ram to the maximum for best performance and change the hard drive to a newer 60gb drive and probably an 32gb ssd later on.

And finally the last question, where can i get the recovery CDs? so i can reinstall this with the new hard drive, or can i clone it somehow? It is shipped with Windows 2000 and i get the 2000 CD with it but i don´t know if it´s the recovery or just the OS disk.

Sorry for all the questions and my bad English but as i said i want it to be in top notch working order for many years because this is a awesome retro machine and it would be sad if it broke down,

Unfortunately, none of the batteries for the TransNote - primary, BIOS, or sub batteries - are manufactured anymore. You can, with relative ease, rebuild the CMOS battery - and you can also build the sub battery from scratch as well, however the primary system battery is more of a challenge to rebuild successfully and I've neither tried nor read of success from anyone who has. I believe the primary system battery can still be bought, however, all stock is old stock from IBM and there aren't any "new" cells to choose from.

The motherboard in the TransNote is essentially a reworked X20 motherboard. The X/T/A20 series is unfortunately somewhat notoriously affected by a problem with the power controller, which - when exhibiting its sign of failure - can fry other electronics on the system board (read about that here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=59577). The EEPROM error is caused as a result of this. It is possible to repair the EEPROM error, which I documented in a post here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=117306

If you were to read the EEPROM and save the dump with the system working, you could re-flash the chip in the event the CRC error appears.

I have recovery disk .iso files I can host for you if you are interested.

Hi, yes i know i have to rebuild the battery but i have pretty good knowledge in regular electronics so this is fine. Can i prevent the power controller to fail somehow and if it does what breaks? Is it repairable or is it toast when/if it happens? (i saw now that it can be repaired but can i prevent it somehow?)

Is it hard to read the EEPROM ? I know i have to solder some cables to the chip and so on but i dont know which program and commands i shall use for the reading part, i have also read your post of flashing it, maybe you wrote the flashing program there ? Or do you know a forum thread or guide that explains the procedure? i have now google it and found little information but do i need to apply power to the transnote to read and flash the chip or is it just GND SDA and SCL pins i need to connect ? and no power ?

And i would gladly take the .iso files, it would make things allot easier.

Thanks for the answers i kinda new to this vintage computer thing, i have allot of interest in it but just want to know the most common thing that can happen to this machine

The EEPROM utilities come from allservice.ro. The EEPROM reader is free but the tool to write the EEPROM is $30 USD.

I'm far from an electrical engineer but from what I've read... there's no silver bullet to ensuring the power failure doesn't happen. But it seems like most have success in repair by replacing the ADP3421 - perhaps you can preemptively replace it to avoid failure? I can't really say for sure. There should be enough details in the thread I posted about the CRC1 failure repair to help get you started, but the step-by-step guides come from the guys at Allservice.ro.

There's some interesting info about the TransNote here as well, which may be worth looking through: http://transnote.info/

Ok thanks for all the good help, i fell much wiser know.
How many discs is the recovery?

The guy who runs transnote.info has some of the files locked away and won't allow download of them without a donation.
Here's a page with a lot of the drivers that are available for download (without the need of a donation):
http://ibmfiles.com/pages/transnote.htm

oh sorry i missed the PM, thank you so much for the files.
yes i have downloaded some drivers from that site, some good info there to

Another question, do i need some special USB-CD rom or do it work with some newer ones? i have one laying around but it is a USB 2.0 drive from 2008 will that work?

I don't believe the TransNote will boot to USB CD-ROM. A PCMCIA CD-ROM may be required...

Hm Ok, is eBay the best bet to find one with shipping to Sweden ?

What you want to do is remove the transnote's HDD, put the windows installation files on it, and then boot into them with an external USB FDD. That's a trick I did for some of my PS/2s as well.

Since you can boot from an external USB FDD, maybe an external USB CD-ROM drive will also work (but it may require a driver).

Ok, USB floppy i have,I allso have the 3 discs in ISO format, shall i mount them and extract the data to the harddrive using a USB adapter ? Or whats the easiest thing to do? And can i use an Old Windows 98 start floppy or do i need some special disc?
As i Said i am fairly new to this vintage stuff. Only used cd installs and now i only do USB memory installs

kon10 wrote:Ok, USB floppy i have,I allso have the 3 discs in ISO format, shall i mount them and extract the data to the harddrive using a USB adapter ? Or whats the easiest thing to do? And can i use an Old Windows 98 start floppy or do i need some special disc?
As i Said i am fairly new to this vintage stuff. Only used cd installs and now i only do USB memory installs

You can use WinRAR to extract any typical Windows98SE ISO. Then what you do is write yourself a windows 98 boot diskette and boot into that via the USB floppy drive. Once in the 98 boot diskette's DOS prompt you can go ahead and point it to the HDD where the extract ISO resides and launch the installer.

So let's say you extract the ISO and put the contents on C:\98, then you'd just type C:\98\setup or whatever the executable for 98 is called. And then the setup will run from the HDD and you'll be golden.

AND, what's great about installing 98SE from the HDD itself, is you won't get any of those annoying "please insert driver disc" bugs, since the installation is always present and aware-- so it'll do its thing automatically. That is, as long as you don't remove the ISO files after you're done installing.

Ok Thank you so much, i shall test it out when it arrives on monday.