Hardware Maintenance Diskette v1.75

[sncdrvr]

Not sure if its appropriate to pursue this here as my understanding is the HMD is not for public use. Moderater, delete this posting if warranted. My T30 2366-LU1 was a cheap EBay purchase. As you can surmise, it needed work. A new sxga display, motherboard with subsequent ram slot repair, 2 Gb ram, 80 Gb hard drive, intel 2200 wireless, a set of origonal restore disks, have a 2.4 GHz cpu and fan on the way now. Its been fun and educational, my machine is obviously out of warrenty, I have a working copy of the HMD, have changed my System-unit Serial# to match the sticker on the bottom of case(2366LU1xxxxxxx). Couple of questions for the members of this great forum! 08-CPU Card Serial#, is this # found on the square circuit board the cpu is affixed to? 38-DC/DC Card Serial#, what is this card, not sure the T30 has one as this info is blank in the CMOS data. 40-System board serial#, is this # on a sticker on the motherboard? I have the origonal nonfunctioning board, but I'm far from it and will be for many months so i cant check and see. Finally, what do the IBM techs use the HMD for? I'm thinking its strictly for warrenty work. But why would they have the option of changing the System board serial#? Would they take sticker if there is one off old board and stick it on new board and then enter that # in the new boards CMOS?

[tporter]

You should look in this topic.

[sncdrvr]

You should look in this topic.

Got it. That thread answers some of my questions, also its apparent I've got to use the "search" function more frequently. One more question, havent found the answer because its probaly such a basic topic, but I find it confusing. The HMD also offers option of Erase Harddrive. Is erasing the harddrive the same as formating it, or are we talking about two completely different procedures with different results? If i use a program like Killdisk to write all zero's, existing data is overwritten, therefore erased. Then, when I run the Factory Restore Disks, they reformat the drive as part of the installation. However, if I dont erase the drive first, the FRD's often wont install the operating system(XP) properly with the hidden partition. I"ve seen threads about op sys install that say "format first". So i'm confused! Does the HMD Erase Harddisk utility format a harddisk? Thankyou!