Thinkpads Forum

Have a 770X that I just replaced the CMOS battery on. Now I'm getting a 189 and unit will not boot to floppy, hard drive or CD. It just goes to bios to run system tests. Unit passes all tests. Any ideas? Also, I tried to update to current bios but the laptop battery (not cmos battery) is bad. Odd that it did boot to IBM Bios Disk but will not boot to any other bootdisk. Any help would be great.
Thanks.

In the HMM it says a 189 error is (Bad EEPROM CRC #1 error)

1.)System Board

UH OH......

never had that error before,maybe someone else can shed some light on it.....I do know you can get replacement bios chips(soldering required),but I think new boards are cheaper....

What do you want for the dead beast..???...If decide to sell....

See if you can perform a bios flash to fix the corruption,if it boots from a floppy.....

Later....

Greg St.L

My 750P got a similar error (bad checksum #2). It is caused by power failing during startup. The security chip is written to many times. Each time it is written, the checksums have to be re-written so that POST passes. If that process gets interrupted, you are out of luck. It's a very bad design in my opinion.

There's no way to boot the machine when that happens. In my case, I was able to buy a nearly complete replacement machine for $5. I'd expect a 770 to be a bit more expensive. :)

It is possible to replace the offending chip with a pre-programmed one, but that can be quite expensive itself... IIRC, $79 for the chip alone. You should be able to buy a working system board for less than that.

Thanks for the info. I think I'll start looking for a bare replacement laptop.
Thanks again.