Thinkpads Forum

Hello to all!

I just acquired a 770 9548-30U at a tag sale for $20 with AC adapter, CD drive and (dead) battery. I bought another battery, floppy and DVD drives for it on eBay. It only had the built-in RAM in it so I popped in a couple of 100Mhz FSB 128Mb sticks of RAM and they worked fine. It's showing 228800 of usable RAM. It has the 1.09 BIOS version. It booted to Windows 98 when I bought it but when I attemped to defrag it, it reported errors on the drive and now blue-screens when it boots. Nothing another hard drive can't fix I guess!

A few questions for you all:

-as I know this is an MMC-1-based system, I believe a PII 400 is the fastest processor it can support. Would there be any overheating issues with this processor and the stock fan? Anyone have a diagram (or can explain) as to what I have to disassemble to replace the processor?

-Any ideas why when I put in a known-bootable Windows 98 CDROM into the device, it freezes on a blank screen with the cursor blinking in the upper left corner after I select "Boot from CDROM"? This has happened with two different CDs with both the CDROM and DVD drives. The rest of my Windows CDs (including my XP ones) it gives the message "CDBOOT: Cannot boot from CD - Code 5". I hope I can boot it with a floppy and load the OS that way!

-I have an old Margi card (DVD/MPEG-2 RAM card) that worked with the old Dell laptops. Anyone know if that card would work to have the laptop play DVDs in lieu of the IBM 12J0411 DVD RAM card for which I cannot find drivers/software for? Ebayers are selling the IBM cards but without software.

-Any hope for using Windows XP if I upgrade it to a PII 400 with the 228Mb of RAM? Does anyone have a similarly-configured 770 and can let me know how slow XP is on it?

Thank you to all for your help! I'd just like to get this working for the kids to use to keep them off our main computer!

First of all congrats on the great find.

Secondly, I haven't worked much with the 770, but upgrading the 600 from a 366 to a 450 didn't produce any unmanageable heat. So I'd assume you're fine... but I'll defer to those who have worked with the 770.

As far as the trouble installing. Check the BIOS updates. Some of them fix boot and install issues. A quick search of Lenovo's site got me this:
Symptoms corrected by version 1.34 - IDET38WW

* (New) Microsoft Windows XP Support(770E and 770ED only)
* (Fix) OS installation failure with CD-ROM boot
* (Fix) Linux system fails with memory size detection. Linux system only.
* (Fix) System doesn't boot with hard disk drives which use all of root directory.
So that might solve your problem if you update the BIOS.

I'm not sure about your Dell DVD card.

But if you slim down your XP install, either using nlite or by disabling unnecessary services, you shouldn't be too bad using XP. I run a slimmed down version on my 600E (366, 288RAM) and it runs great. The video is the bottle neck. 2MB (not sure what it is on the 770) slows rendering quite a bit. But I'd definitely give it a shot. I'm very pleased with the performance, even using the default theme.

Good Luck

Thanks for the info!

Yes, I had bookmarked the driver page and was just waiting on the floppy drive to arrive to update the BIOS. It came today. Stupid me bought an internal floppy so the Win98 boot disk won't install the CDROM driver as I had to take it out to install the floppy ;o) No matter though if the BIOS update corrects the boot from CDROM issue!

Keep the info and opinions coming!

Update:

Updated the BIOS to the latest revision for my unit...unit now will load Win98 from CD, yahoo!

I haven't been this excited about Win98 in 10 years ;o)

I'm still curious about how far I can take this unit upgrade-wise...

I'm glad to help.

As I was getting excited about my Thinkpad find I did a LOT of searching. This might increase your excitement:
http://www.msfn.org/board/Windows-9x-Me ... s-f91.html
http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html

People are keeping Win98 alive and have been putting out Service packs and updates for it despite Microsoft no longer supporting it. I would also HIGHLY recommend you checking out Linux. It seems a bit overwhelming at first but if you check out a few Linux OSs, you'll see its really not bad at all. I recommend Xubuntu (lighter version of ubuntu), Zenwalk, TinyMe, PuppyLinux or Wolvix Cub There are lighter ones out there but these are modern looking and in the most cases good to go Out-of-box, with office software and support for mp3 playback and whatnot. If they're not, a couple quick mouse clicks will put you where you need to be.

Some linux links:
http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/off ... -400-dingo
http://www.zenwalk.org/
http://www.xubuntu.org/
http://tinyme.mypclinuxos.com/wiki/doku.php?id=download
http://wolvix.org/node/613

Again, good luck.

Holy cow, good deal. I didn't even know Win98 was still being supported by the community at large!

Further update:

Win98 successfully installed and all IBM drivers updated.

FYI, I successfully ran a low-level format on the drive then a Scandisk and it found no errors. I still think it may be flaky because the "F1-on-bootup" IBM utility won't complete a check on it...it hangs and I have to reboot. Does the same thing for the memory check too.

All I need is my Win98 compatible PCMCIA wireless network card to arrive and I can get it on the Internet.

FYI, The Dell Margi DVD RAM card didn't work because it says it needs to be in a ZV (Zoomed Video) card slot. I guess the card slots on the 770 aren't ZV. Therefore, the only hope if playing DVDs on this beast is to use the IBM card but I can't find drivers or software for it.

Thanks again!

Again, congrats.

Here is a good resource if you haven't run across it in your searches yet:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770

If you can't find the drivers for your DVD drive, again I recommend trying Linux. Even a dual boot might be worth it to get DVD playback on your machine. They have a lot of generic drivers that "should" work.

You might find this helpful if you go that route.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installat ... inkPad_770

Linux would be awesome on this...if I wasn't giving to my kids to use with their CDROM-based Windows games ;o)

A 770 was my workhorse machine for several years. I still have it. The backlight inverter failed just as the warranty was about to run out, so EZserv fixed it and also replaced the trashed bezel (peeling paint was a common 770 problem) and cleaned up the keyboard so the machine is looking good. I think it has Red Hat Linux 6 on it but I haven't used it in a few years (replaced with an A20p (now trashed) and then an A22p). I'd sure like an SXGA screen for it. I guess by today's standards, 233 mhz and 128MB of ram is not much of a development machine, but for lots of day to day stuff (email, web browser) it's quite fine, so I keep the 770 around figuring I may find a use for it someday.

landsmarra wrote: FYI, I successfully ran a low-level format on the drive then a Scandisk and it found no errors. I still think it may be flaky because the "F1-on-bootup" IBM utility won't complete a check on it...it hangs and I have to reboot. Does the same thing for the memory check too.

Congrats! I hope your kids have many good years with the 770.

As for your drive, I assume it's an older IBM / Travelstar unit. You said you ran a low-level format, did you do that with Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test program? If not, you might want to download this (it will fit on a floppy) and let it scan your drive for errors.

Is it possible that one slot is ZV and the other is not? Did you try both slots?

The Margi/Dell MPEG2-Card will work fine, get drivers from Dell.