T21 stopped booting (solved, Duh)

[Bot13]

Got this in a "lot" buy, loaded W2k sp4 on it. Used pcmcia wifi to d/L video driver. It worked fine until I checked it to find errors 0271 time/date each time on power up, and 8257 sys CMOS intermittent. Not overly worried about it, figured might make good practice to update BIOS as I'v never done that b4. Should I get it fixed, will probably give it to a nephew as a gift. I did do a search on basics, and have been to the BIOS d/L page for T23 yet can't seem to find my way back. PS it has 126meg RAM.


Turns out the CMOS battery didn't carry a charge, changed it and didn't change date in BIOS.
works w/o problem

[rkawakami]

Not quite sure what you mean by stopped booting. Is it the case where the hard drive LED flashes when you press the power button and nothing else happens? If so, this is called the "Blink of Death" and is a somewhat common problem with the T20, T21 and T22 systems (among others). If it's powering up and showing the 0271 error each time, then that's indicative of a dead CMOS (backup) battery. None of the T23 BIOS updates can or should be run on the T21. The BIOS update files for the T21 are here:

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... sdkz34.exe (diskette update version)
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... sdkz34.txt (README / release notes)