Thinkpads Forum

After several frustrating days of trying to setup an OS onto a 600E that I bought off Ebay, I thought I'd record some of the gymnastics I went through so that others may benefit in the future. I found a lot of good info on this forum on many topics, so I want to tie it together for others.


1) Boot up errors: It seems that [censored] near every thinkpad ever bought on EBAY comes without good batteries. In particular, if the CMOS (or backup battery for us non-techies) is dead, you will get error messages when the machine self-tests. Errors 161 and 163 seem to be sure signs of a dead battery. Experiences seem to vary, but without the CMOS battery the machine generally won't boot up.

Good advice on fixing this can be found here:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=21895

2) It appears to be a common problem that if you get a 600E (and possibly other models) with a HD without an OS, you may/will have trouble booting your OS disk from the CD. Since a lot of thinkpads sold on EBay come without a floppy drive, this problem seems to occur a fair bit. I've searched and found many posts over time here with a version of this problem.

First, make sure that the BIOS is set to boot from the CD. Press F1 while booting the computer and go into the Start Up section, and ensure that under Power On, that the CDROM is the first device listed for booting. This solved some people's problems.

I, however, tried booting legit versions of 95, 98se, ME, and even XP without success. At least 2 of those, I KNOW are bootable CDs, so that wasn't the problem. After ridiculous amounts of goofing around (removing RAM, booting with and without the battery, switching RAM around, standing on my head, etc) I was never able to get the machine to boot from CD.

If you are unlucky, like me, this will not solve your problem. I suspect (but cannot confirm) that the machine just wasn't recognizing that the CDROM drive was even there. I eventually had to resort to borrowing a floppy drive from a friend and booting with that drive and an old WINDOWS 98 startup disk that I miraculously found in my desk drawer (pack rat for the win!). From there, I was able to access the CDROM drive and run the SETUP file. Installation proceeded normally.

In conclusion, I would suggest that you buy a laptop with a floppy drive or an installed OS. Spare yourself the misery I have known .

I hope this is helpful to someone down the road to repay the great help others gave me.

Oh yeah..In the past month I've bought 1 600,1 600e and 2 600x's off of Ebay..All in all I've been pretty [censored] lucky,all were/are in pretty good shape..

But I have to agree with you 1000%...My God they are a pain to load an OS on...BSOD's,hanging,formatting the HD wrong,and on and on...1 600x I couldn't laod anything on it,until I swapped the RAM..

The 600e I could not load XP or 2000 on it..I even tried to load 2000 from the floppies,nada..But Win98 loaded fine(which BTW I couldn't get to load on any of the other 600's) then upgraded to 2000..No problems..

Once the OS is on them I love em,but getting the OS on them makes me want to cry..

BTW speaking of all my 600's...I got 3 of the 4 going..But the last 600x is giving me a 301 error...

Thats a keyboard error,so eventually I plan on getting a new keyboard..But right now I can get to the OS by pressing the F1 key after the error..BUT I can't get to the BIOS...Anyone know any tricks to get to the BIOS with this keyboard error? Thx

It's model is 2645-8BU.It works fine on win98/me/linux!!

Ha, that is funny. I have never had much of a problem with the IBMs. The Portege I have bought of ebay have been lots of trouble. For a start, they don't have internal cd, they have PCMCIA cd drives - which aren't recognised in dos (they should be, but often don't work right).

In the end, I just have to remove the harddrive, and stick it into one of the IBMs. This works a treat.

I too have had very few problems working the the 600/600E series, and I have worked on/set up over 250 of them.

The one that was going to put me over the edge was installing Win98SE on my 701CS. But I was able to format the drive in my T21 and copy the files over to a second partition on the drive. From there, I returned the drive to the Butterfly and installed from D:\.

You may have already done this, but on my TP600 I couldn't get my OEM Win98SE CD to boot (even though it booted fine on my desktop machine). I had to buy a floppy drive off eBay and update the BIOS to the latest version. Once that was done, the CD booted right up. In the end, I bought an OEM version of WinXP Home and it also booted right away (after the BIOS upgrade) and installed with no problems.

I too would recommend getting a floppy drive if you buy an unknown 600 series. It's needed to update the BIOS. Once the last BIOS upgrade is in there are usually no problems. It's well worth the $20 or so (after shipping) to get the floppy drive even if you never use it again -- unless you know someone on here who will loan you one.

Maybe someone should offer a service -- "buy" a floppy drive for x amount, then get x amount back when it's returned. One of you guys with 10+ 600s lying around mught be able to do this. Heck, go ahead and send the floppy with the latest BIOS on it and sell it as an upgrade package. All but $5 and shipping returned when a working floppy drive is sent back. If you want to make sure the floppy is sent back charge more than they can be purchased for -- say $35+ shipping, then send $30 back when it's returned. Just an idea!

Interesting idea, I thought of doing it before, but wasn't sure if anyone would "buy" into it. (pun not really intended)