Thinkpads Forum

Howdy, I have a client that brought in her TP 600E....the system only recognizes about 8GB of the 40GB Toshiba HDD...It was originally a FAT16 file sys, which I changed to FAT32 via Partition Magic 4.0....I also was able to increase the partition size to around 8GB....however, it still will nnot recognize the full 40GB of HD space....also, any trick on flashing the BIOS without an internal FDD....please help as I am pulling my hair out over this and I don't have very much to begin with...

I assume you don't have a floppy, so here's what to do to regain your HDD space. Go to another computer, and burn a bootable CD with Win98SE boot-up Floppy, then use it to boot with (make sure it is set as first boot device in BIOS). Then use Fdisk, and delete all partitions, remake one partition the size of the entire drive and then reboot. CAUTION- You will lose everything on the drive if you do this. Last of all, use your bootable Windows installation CD of choice and re-load everything. You should have the full use of your hard drive now. In regards to flashing the BIOS without a floppy, maybe someone else has a suggestion. Seems that if you are not using NTFS (Win2K/WinXP), you could actually load the bios flash file on the C drive or on CDrom, but I may be wrong. Newer Thinkpads have a non-floppy alternative where you begin the flash process from within windows...it shuts your computer down and continues the upgrade of the BIOS in its own sort of "DOS Shell," but not sure if that's available for the 600 series or not. Go to the IBM site and take a look.

I have done a flash bios update on my 600X. Below the file for the update is/was a link to a flash updater file, I didn't see it first off but I noticed it after dloading the txt file for the floppy version.