[ltp] Fear and loathing in the BIOS

[Daniel]

Hi,

just thought I'd share my very recent experiences.
I dropped my T43. Like in from the desk to the floor. Not on purpose, of
course. I just wanted to move from A to B, and the network cable got
entangled somehow. Luckily, the same cable broke the fall somewhat - but
not completely. Needless to say, I had never bothered to set up HDAPS
under linux. A long SMART selftest then confirmed I had several
unreadable sectors. The usual method for dealing with these didn't work,
but I managed to pretty much destroy my filesystem that way. I ended up
using a utility from Hitachi, which finally persuaded my drive to
reallocate the bad sectors. Now, time for a full recovery. And also, a
BIOS and EC firmware update, just for the heck of it. I did the BIOS
first, worked like a charm [1]. Almost there, just download the EC
update. Execute, say yes a dozen times, get the "Now updating" message.
Wait... and wait. Nothing happens, 30 seconds have gone past long ago.
At this point, I was not happy. Not at all. Knowing no way to go from
here, I called it a day and just kept the machine running. Next morning,
I walked into my friendly local ThinkCenter and explained the mess.
Noone had seen this before, and I was redirected to the hotline. Called,
pressed some keys, then finally got a person to talk to. He then instructed
me to turn my Thinkpad off and on again, and it still booted! Only the EC
still was at the old version. Some trying later, the solution was found:
I needed to start the update with a bootable floppy. No idea why, but
that worked. Now I am typing at one working T43 1871-F1G, with a dozen
hidden bad sectors on the drive. To my great pleasure, the update [2]
seems to have fixed the whining noises which previously plagued me when
running on battery.
Considering this, an update *might* be worth a try. But beware the
possible consequences: I was lucky. You might not be.

ciao,
Daniel

[1] Thinkwiki says you should update the EC first, but the IBM download
page states pretty clearly to do the BIOS first.
[2] Now BIOS 70ET68WW (v 1.28) and EC 70HT28WW (v 1.05)