Thinkpad R51 Rebuild

[rstarkey]

Hi all,

I had an old R51 from work which I gave to my brother in law. The disks were formatted first (to get rid of any sensitive data) and then the OS (Windows XP) rebuilt.

The machine boots fine, but there are problems with other hardware - no USB ports work (have tested with an external drive, which powers but cannot access) and there are issues with the display. Also the battery doesn't appear to be charging. All these worked fine before.

I suspect this is all related to driver issues, but no problems are reported. Because the drives were formatted, the directory C:/IBMTOOLS is no longer there, so this could be the problem. The BIOS is up to date and everything enabled.

I downloaded a recovery disk from

http://www.user-guides.co.uk/asp/pro...=any&PT_ID=all

but that did not resolve the issue.

Can anyone give me advice on how I can rebuild this machine so that all the hardware is working (I am prepared to wipe everything clean and start over!!!).

Many thanks

Rich

[aaa]

USB doesn't need extra drivers to work. If this is a fresh install, I would suspect a hardware problem.

[madmaven]

Did you go to the device manager and see which drivers were installed . If your xp disk is older than the machine then many of the drivers wont show up there . I had to install the usb controllers and several drivers when I set up R40s. the usb did work though before I installed the controller. If your drivers are not installed you can go to lenovo. com and get the drivers the web site is easy to use and very helpful

[ajkula66]

This smells like a hardware problem...in the motherboard area...

Download or borrow a copy of a "live" Linux CD, and boot from it. If your USB ports still don't work, your display issues are present and battery fails to charge...you have a hardware problem, if any of the answers to above questions is "yes"...

Good luck.