X201 - new motherboard, wrong serial. Maintenance disc reqd?

[braeburn]

Hi,

I have a lenovo x201 laptop (built c.2011) and the motherboard broke about two months out of the warranty period.

I found a replacement on eBay not too expensive but after installing, I now get the 2200 warning - "2200: Machine Type and Serial Number are invalid".

Having looked online I found a number of posts suggesting the old maintenance disc programs (originally for floppy?, this model has no cd or floppy drive). But a couple suggest there's also a usb version.

Digging online, I found a few different versions of the software 1.72, 1.76 and 1.83 but none of them seem to work. The instructions for 1.72 say to copy the files to floppy disc (I tried copying to USB and booting). The 1.76 has a working program that copies the same files and formats the USB as a floppy, the 1.83 version has the same files again and two different programs to make a bootable disk, but neither work. I tried again copying the 1.83 files to USB and booting from there.

In all three cases when booting, the computer appears to be able to boot from the USB stick, but instead of any startup, I only get two white underscores flashing alternately in the bottom left of a black screen.

Would anyone have a working copy of the maintenance disc or otherwise help me with correcting the serial number problem?

Many thanks.

[EOMtp]

Welcome to the forum!

[braeburn]

Thank you so much!

[Elwyn]

Thank you so much!

Alas it wasn't quite the response you were after, which was unfortunate

Did you solve this in the end, and if so how did you do it please?