[ltp] Firmware Upgrade for 60GB 7200rpm drives (T41, R50) -- ISO image

[William R Sowerbutts]

Hi all,

I received an email from IBM this morning announcing a firmware ugprade for
the 60GB 7200rpm drive used in my T41P. There is no option for doing the
firmware upgrade without a copy of Windows lying around to extract the
firmware update image; indeed, the "diskless" upgrade failed to work for me
with Windows XP, so I was forced to make my own!

I extracted the disk image to a floppy on a Windows machine and then took an
image of that to built a bootable "El Torito" ISO. 

I've made this image available below in case anyone would like to upgrade
their drive but doesn't want to go through the same hassle. Uncompress the
image with gunzip, burn it to a CD-R or CD-RW with cdrecord, and then boot
from it (press F12 when the IBM BIOS splash screen appears). The command I
used was:

cdrecord -v dev=/dev/hdc fs=16M ./firmware-upgrade-hdd-1.iso

I have no idea what issues this firmware upgrade addresses, despite having 
read all of the included documentation -- anyone know? I'm guessing it's a 
reliability issue of some sort.

This image worked for me, but as with all firmware upgrades you should 
exercise caution.

Download it here:

http://sowerbutts.com/thinkpad/firmware-upgrade-hdd-1.iso.gz  (744KB)

I hope this helps someone. Good luck!

Will

Here's the original message from IBM:

----- Forwarded message from Thinkpad <thinkpad@us.ibm.com> -----

From: Thinkpad <thinkpad@us.ibm.com>
To: IBM ThinkPad Owner <IBM_ThinkPad_Owner@us.ibm.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 22:26:59 -0500
Subject: ThinkPad R50, T41 - Mandatory hard disk drive firmware update

Dear IBM Customer,

IBM has released a mandatory firmware update that may affect your IBM
ThinkPad R50 or T41 computer.   For details, and to download the update,
please visit:
http://www.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=TPAD-HDFIRM

If you need help or additional information, please contact your nearest IBM
Support Center:
http://www.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-4HWSE3

Sincerely,

Your IBM Support Center

<<<Please do not respond to this note.  It has been sent by a service
machine. >>>
----- End forwarded message -----

_________________________________________________________________________
William R Sowerbutts                                  will@sowerbutts.com
Coder / Guru / Nrrrd                                http://sowerbutts.com
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