760XD BIOS upgrade without a battery?

[Bookworm]

The readme that comes with the BIOS upgrade for the 760XD says I *must* have a fully charged battery, and if I do anything wrong, I will need a new system board. I imediately reformatted the disk. I don't want anything that dangerous in the house!

I read in another tread that it's possible to bypass the battery check. Please tell me *exactly* how to do this *safely* in a 760XD!

Will the BIOS upgrade fix increase the hard drive limit above 8 gig, or make it boot from a CD? If not, is there any reason to risk a BIOS upgrade.

[TriAngle]

I had a 770X with a dead battery. This worked for me.
Here you go.

IBM ThinkPad - Update the BIOS with a Dead Battery

ThinkPad 770X BIOS Update with a Dead Battery:
1. Create the BIOS update Floppy Disk using the updated BIOS file downloaded from ibm's website.
* NOTE: If you do not have a Floppy Disk Drive, just run the BIOS update file on a computer with a Floppy Disk Drive, then burn the contents of the Floppy Disk to a blank CD-R disk (you can just make a folder on your desktop and copy all the contents of the floppy disk to this folder, then burn the contents of this folder as a DATA disk to a blank CD-R disk), then in Step 4 below, insert the BIOS update CD-R into the CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive, then locate the CD-R disk via the 'dir' command in DOS-mode, and continue with Step 5 below.
2. Restart the laptop using a WinME StartUp Floppy Disk.
3. After the laptop boots into DOS-mode, remove the WinME StartUp Floppy Disk.
4. Insert the BIOS update Floppy Disk from Step 1.
5. Type "Flash2 /u" (without the quotes).
6. Hit Enter.
7. The BIOS will 'unconditionally' update, regardless of a dead battery.
8. After the BIOS has been updated, remove the BIOS update Floppy Disk.
9. Turn OFF the laptop (do NOT restart).
10. Press and HOLD DOWN the F1 key.
11. Turn the laptop ON (while still HOLDING DOWN the F1 key).
12. The BIOS Setup screen will appear.
13. Click "Config".
14. Click "Initialize".
15. Click "OK".
16. Click "OK", again (if necessary).
17. Check the new BIOS name/date, etc.
18. Exit out of BIOS Setup.
19. Restart the laptop into Windows.
20. Click Start/Programs/ThinkPad/Configuration.
21. Check the BIOS name/date, etc.

[rockliszard]

Hi Bookworm,
My 760xd has been updated to the latest BIOS version. The machine still won’t boot to a cd. Sorry. If you plan to run windows 2000 (or xp) you will need this update. Up to 5 gig hard drives are supported

Note that the 770 and 600 are much more advanced machines (p3) than the 760 (a Pentium 1) The 760xd appears to be a 380 class chipset with more advanced audio and video extras

If you turn on the computer and hold down f1 till the setup screen comes up the current BIOS revision will be displayed. HXET60WW is the latest-1999

Do you have 98se on your 3 gig drive? If so you could help me with a PCIC driver problem.

[Bookworm]

> Up to 5 gig hard drives are supported

It already supports 8 gig drives without the upgrade.

> If so you could help me with a PCIC driver problem.

What's a PCIC driver?

[rockliszard]

Hi Bookworm, There is no direct evidence of a 5 G hard drive limit . The exact wording from the readme file is “ Version 2.00 (HXET51WW) 08-15-97 (New) IBM 4GB and 5GB hard disk drives are supported.” This may mean these IBM drives have special firmware so they won’t be compatible ? A search of earlier posts on this forum turned up a couple of cases where a 6 G hard drive wouldn’t work in a 760. Could be the hard drive caddie they were using had one of those “flawed”ribbon cables?

I have a 5.1 hard drive caddie. I bid on some 6 G hard drives on e-bay to try in it. So far I have tried a 2G and a 1.4 G with no problems.

The battery in my 760 is working much better after a few weeks of charge discharge cycles. After years of storage I am now getting almost an hour.

If I had a 10 or 12 G hard drive I would experiment: Put it in a desktop with a adapter and set the size to 5G using a disk utility like disk wizard starter edition or maxblast. If that worked I would try some larger sizes. I am reluctant to buy any more laptop hard drives on E-bay. The two I got had lots of yellow “poor access sectors” when tested with watadiag. (Some of these sectors required so many reads that even scandisk marked them as bad. I like my drives to test totally in the green (less than 18 msec) These drives tested totally flashing red (greater than 36msec).

DWSE10305.EXE makes a floppy boot disk with disk wizard SE on it

I plan to reactivate an older thread to explore the card buss driver problem. Any help with that would be most welcome...

[rockliszard]

http://thinkpads.com/6gig-limit.htm This is a tip on installing a large drive on a 760xd using Ibm’s version of Disk manager 2000. I found a page with several versions from different hard drive makers conveniently listed except IBM’s. With a little luck I found the name of the file to download to get IBM’s version: dm_2000.exe
One place to get it ftp://ftp1.fkkt.uni-lj.si/DiskUtility/dm_2000.exe
ftp://ftp1.fkkt.uni-lj.si/DiskUtility/00-index.txt