[ltp] Thinkpad Hardware Maintenance Diskette

[John Morris]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Byeong-ryeol Kim wrote:

> > Diskette.  IBM says it isn't available to mortals, but a posting on this
> > list (from Apr 21, two days ago) implies there are copies in the 'wild'.
> 
> The site mentioned in IBM's pdf manuals perl product seems to be
> obsolete. I wasted several days to find proper site.
> Try to visit <ftp://ftp.pc.ibm.com/pub/pccbbs/>. there are many
> subdirectories under it. 'mobiles' or 'ta_support' subdirectory
> might have the file you want. I recall there were maintxxx diskette
> images perl model, and so to select proper one is important.

I found maint160.exe, since the service manual referred to version 1.60 I
took a chance on it.  It worked, no more error 188!  

> Since the model of youre notebook are not explicitly spoken, and
> due to the UUID problem I mentioned in previous mail I'm not
> convinced this is helpful.

Mine is a 570E.  I could care less about the UUID, I'm not a corporate
type trying to manage a fleet of the puppies.  As long as it boots without
error I'm happy since the serial number printed on the bottom should be
enough for warranty purposes. :)

> On my 600X, I recall maintenance diskette required 'ESC' at POST time
> before ThinkPad logo appears to make EEPROM writable. If I did so, there
> were keyboard errors besides 189 error, but I could go into CMOS menu.
> But, I failed to revert my origianl UUID, since I couldn't manually type
> UUID into it. I could use (hidden) shortcut key such as Ctrl-G without maint
> diskette in CMOS menu, too,  but Automatically changed UUID was not meaningful
> to me.

On my machine ESC would skip past the error and allow the machine to boot
normally.  I had seen other sites mention hidden keys to edit the serial
number but I walked the whole keyboard with each modifier and got nowhere.  
Seems they removed that feature from my BIOS.

Anyway, my box is happy again and anyone else needing a copy of the disk
should be able to find it from reading this thread.  (If you can't or IBM
removes it, drop me a note.)

--
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
Geek code 3.0:GCS C+++ UL++++$ P++ L+++ W++ N++ w--- Y+ 5+++ R tv- b++ e* r


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