Thinkpads Forum

Ok, well I've seen this question asked (i think) but not addressed here. I don't have a floppy drive for the BIOS update as outlined in IBM's instructions. So I'm wondering if anyone has tried/succeded or heard of putting the files on a DOS formatted hard disk and performing the upgrade from there. Maybe even with a ramdrive loaded from the hard disk at startup with the BIOS files copied to that?

I've found out too many times (and continue to do so) that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so hopefully someone has some intelligent thoughts on this.

Thanks,

curly

curly_nostrill wrote:Ok, well I've seen this question asked (i think) but not addressed here. I don't have a floppy drive for the BIOS update as outlined in IBM's instructions. So I'm wondering if anyone has tried/succeded or heard of putting the files on a DOS formatted hard disk and performing the upgrade from there. Maybe even with a ramdrive loaded from the hard disk at startup with the BIOS files copied to that?

I've found out too many times (and continue to do so) that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so hopefully someone has some intelligent thoughts on this.

Thanks,

curly

First of all do you have a working battery that is able to hold charge?

Hey cmarti, yes, amazingly this battery charges very well for a machine that my daughter and her friend found in the trash! HA.

I had to add a HD. Had some trouble getting it to boot off the HD at first until I figured out that the bios would only recognize win98 and below,... it's a fairly old revision. I finally just got it to boot off a Freedos installation made on another machine. I'm reluctant to run the update in Freedos, though, without some other learned input. I was thinking of just formating the HD again and copying the update floppy files from IBM there. Just not sure if it will loose connection with the HD during the update, ergo the whacky ramdrive idea. But also not sure if it will loose the memory contents during the update.

Any input is wildly appreciated. Thanks.

I don't think it is helpful to your situation, still I'll mention it. IBM also offers a bios updater that don't require a floppy. It does, however, require a hard drive and windows (or perhaps just dos).

curly_nostrill,

Can you provide the machine type number?

Hey C,

The machine is "Type 2644".



And, cure,

yes I thought I had seen something about a bios updater utility that is run from within windows or dos included with the IBM utilities but I don't see any reference to it now. I will look harder.

First, I want to thank you guys for chiming in so quickly to help. This is just a really, really great forum and community from what I see. I don't think I'll ever want to use anything but thinkpads from now on

Now, I don't know what happpened but I put the floppy files on the Freedos disk and booted but since I had moved all the other files into a folder there was no Freedos kernel. I don't know if somehow the machine picked up the bios on it's own or I figured it out in my sleep but I seem to have the latest bios available from IBM! (imet65ww). However, the bios date reported while in the bios screen is dated '99 while the date of the bios file is 17 oct 2001. But I doubt that means much.

I've managed to install PC-BSD which I'm using right now. I installed to a disk in a desktop and pulled it out before it rebooted and just put it in the 570 and WOW. I was surprised. I imagine I could maybe rebuild the kernel or something to make it work a bit better but it works fairly well as it is. It froze up after I made some changes like taking off all the eye candy but booted right back up. I'm looking into XUBUNTU now to try that out. But PC-BSD is working fantastically. I haven't had to configure anythig at all which has almost never happened to me with any *NIX install. I plugged in an Orinoco silver and it came right up without having to touch a thing!

Thanks again guys, happy thinking and padding,

curly