TP560 questions (error 8611, new hard drive, linux, freebsd)

[virex]

Hi guys!

please help me out with my newly bought gadget!
recently i bought a ThinkPad 560 from a friend. there was win95 on it, so i formatted the drive and installed freebsd

my first problem is that the trackpoint is removed. well not the lack of it is the problem, but the error it creates now: it was okay when i bought it, but since then i was buggin' around with the bios, and accidentally put it back to factory-default... :/
so now i'm having the 8611 error on boot for the trackpoint is missing...
do you have any idea how to fix it? i found a solution for TP600s, but the "20h to 01" isn't working for me... :/
is there a different hex code for disabling the trackpoint?

the second thing i encountered was that freebsd is booting up fine with the stock kernel, but linux isn't!
i have 16 megs of ram (8 built in and 8 expansion), that could be the problem for the stock debian kernel to reboot when it's just starting to expand the kernel to the ramdisk?

the third question is that do you think i can put a 10 gig hard drive in it? (it was a 800 megs before)

it's bios version is 1.11, and please consider, i don't have any floppy or cd-rom drives. (i put the op.sys and my things onto it by using a virtual machine on another comp.)

thanks for the help in advance, Istvan

[virex]

no one?

[Davemci]

I don't have a 560, but neither my 560x or 560z would allow me to partition my 13gig hard disk greater then 7.45gig using Windows 98SE even if I used Linux FDISK to create a windows partition.. Also, Linux would only boot from a floppy. When I tried adding Lilo to my MBR neither Linux or windows would boot. I don't have an answer for the 8611 error, but would also like to know how to dissable the trackpoint. Good luck!

[virex]

hi and thanks for the reply!

by the time I've just managed to solve the 8611 error, and the bios-upgrade, my way was a bit difficult as I don't have a floppy or a cd-rom in this little baby... [edit: oh, i wrote it before, sorry... ]
so I did it by plugging it's hard drive to my other computer, put on dos and the thinkpad config utilities for dos, oh and also the bios flashing stuff. (it wasn't so easy as ibm gives these as self-extracting floppy images... my other laptop don't have a floppy drive either so i did it by a virtual machine and a floppy image)
so it was easy to turn off the trackpoint with the official sw from ibm in dos.
after flashing the bios to the latest, i was able to install win98se (98lite actually) on it... so maybe the linux-problem is also solved...

as for the hard drive: so you use your 13gig as a 7.5gig one? or 2 partitions?
afaik you can use all of it in linux by creating a very small partiton just for the /boot and then partition the rest as you like...
i can't use linux on mine :/ i need it to store/read my guitarpro tabs, and dguitar is more resource-hungry than guitarpro itself :/
maybe if there was a text-mode alternative....

[Davemci]

The 13 gig has 3 partitions. 7 gig for windows, a linux swap partition and a linux partition. I have a CDROM and a floppy, but really don't use either because I like just throwing the 560 in my truck and war driving for wifis. It's nice and light and easy to tote around.

I read that the 560E uses bit 6 at offset 0x20. That would mean writing 0x20 at location 0x20. Is that what you found? I set bit 6 but the trackpoint wasn't dissabled. I've also seen that setting 0x20 to 0x62 will allow the thinkpad to boot even with errors. My 560x has 00 at offset 0x20.

[virex]

i found that 0x20 should be 01, but that's for TP600 only :/
haven't found anything for 560...
but here's how my bios table looks like:

Code: Select all

  | 0| 1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| 8| 9| A| B| C| D| E| F
00|48|00|56|22|17|23|03|12|10|06|26|02|50|80|00|00
10|40|00|F0|10|03|80|02|00|3C|7F|00|00|00|46|11|00
20|2A|13|89|00|00|00|00|00|00|87|77|00|00|00|04|9B
30|00|3C|20|01|00|00|00|00|00|00|00|00|00|00|00|00
40|9B|48|02|01|00|03|00|04|00|0B|F0|00|00|FF|FF|FF
50|00|06|00|00|00|00|F0|0F|0C|00|F0|04|14|00|FF|FF
60|FF|00|06|22|00|91|02|01|96|80|39|44|FF|F0|00|10
70|AB|02|02|04|04|0F|00|00|0A|0E|02|82|49|53|B2|00

i found out that you still can boot it, if it founds an error (that's how i could boot into dos)
when you boot, it gives the error codes, and the diagnostic stuff, just exit the bios, and you'll manage to skip the post, after it gives you some weird symbols, but you can skip it also by f1 if i remember right, so you can boot your opsys.

hope i could help...