Thinkpads Forum

As said before I fried something in my 600E. So I decided to buy a new one. First thing when I started it up (Untouched by me) it said 161 and 163, appearantly a battery problem.
So I switched to a new battery, same problem. Also, there seems to be no way of getting into ez-setup or boot to a HD. Most of the things I've tried caused me to end up at a flickering "OFF -> ON" error.

What's wrong and is there a remedy?

(I've tried searching the forums, but I got 0 results, presumably because the forum doesn't index short words. Google on the other hand gives a lot of junk because on and off are too common words)

Errors 161 and 163 are typically the CMOS (backup) battery and not the main battery. The Off->On message is telling you that you have to power cycle the system.

Assuming you replaced the CMOS battery, you still need to set the system date and time. If you can't access Easy Setup by holding down the F1 key at power on (i.e, a lock symbol appears), then the system has a BIOS password and you need to contact the seller and find out what it is.

Once the date and time have been properly set, you should be able to boot an operating system.

Searching the forums for "161 163 error battery" and checking "search for all terms" yields 41 hits, most of them in this conference.

Yes, I know. That's how it should be. But instead, I always get stuck at OFF -> ON whenever the system is supposed to boot or enter ez-setup. And when I power cycle I'm back at where I started.
I'm also pretty sure the BIOS battery is ok. It was ok when I tried booting the 600E where it used to be. I could possibly insert it there again just to check, but to a 99% certainty the BIOS battery is ok.

So it's a weird error indeed.

A small update. I moved the same battery to the other 600E, and it did the same thing (161, 163, OFF->ON) but only once. Ergo, the problem is not in the actual battery, but somehwre along the way, such as on the motherboard.

As a side note I can also mention that a 450 MHz PII worked fine with the 8% overclock. (In ez-setup and Windows' F8 boot prompt, I didn't start Windows, so I don't know how stable it is, but it clearly works to some degree)

Please take this with the understanding that I'm a baby here at these forums but I was having the same errors with my 600e, I would go on and reset the time and date and then it would go to the on-off screen so I would just shut it off manually and the immediately restart it and it would then go on and load normal. I had to do this for a while until I finally found out what was causing it , when I finally found out that it was a $3 - $5 battery I replaced it and all is well. Also, at first when the battery started to go bad, it would start with errors one time and start fine the next.
But I don't know much about these machines once you start upgrading them. I am just now starting to upgrade my 600e and am having a hard time finding out what is compatible and what isn't. So far I've added a dvd-rom (it plays pretty good but it is still jerky- can't get that figured out) and I've added a 40 MB HD and am currently looking for compatible RAM. I'm wanting to upgrade the cpu but can't figure out which ones are compatible and how high I can go without having to do things that I don't know how to do.
But anyways, I hope you get it figured out.

~susiejo

Ah yes, here it is:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=38299