Thinkpads Forum

Hello.

My name is Pete and I recently aquired a Thinkpad 600. It has IBET39WW bios date 03/26/99.

My issue is the orginal HDD is faulty. It is a Thinkpad 10gb but just ticks, so just a paper weight.

I have installed other HDD's but all over 10gb. A 20, 40 and 60. I can only format them to 2gb. This is using a restore disk. I am assuming that the BIOS needs updating but from researching the forum it seems this laptop should take up to 80gb. As it had a 10gb originally, why would it not recognise disks to at least 10?

I have already replaced the BIOS battery. The main battery holds a charge but I don't think it ever turns green when charging. With the machine off, the charging light comes on green. After 2 seconds it goes orange.

I only have a CD-ROM and no floppy disk. I Have tried updating the BIOS by writing a flash disk on floppy, running the .exe on an old Toshiba I have, then copying the flash files to CD. I've tried 3 BIOS versions but the flash program says I have the wrong system for the bios. Could that be because I'm using a CD and some files are not copied over correctly?

I bought 4 floppy drives thinking they would fit but the connector is in the wrong place on all 4 drives!!

I'm now at a loss. A 2gb laptop is no use to anyone.

Thank you for looking.

I have a 600 to test and it can recognize 40G HDD perfectly...
Most likely it's not your BIOS issue. DOS <=6.22 allows up to 2G per logic drive, did you use DOS fdisk and format?

Thanks for the reply panips.

I had a lightbulb moment yesterday. What if I stripped one of my four FDD's, stripped the laptop and tried to attach the FDD? This turned out to be a great idea. Once I had both stripped, I managed to attach the FDD connect to the motherboard. I booted using a Win98 boot disk. Then swapped to my BIOS disk. The program ran and installed the latest BIOS in about a minute.

I now have a running Windows 2000 Pro on a 60GB HDD.

I hope this might help anyone struggling with the CDROM method which, after hours of trying proved fruitless. The FDDs for the 600 (2654-45U) seem very rare compared to the later version I am assuming is for the 600E and X models. I have 3 spare if anyone needs one!