From: alex (ace_at_roadfly.org)
Date: Thu Jul 18 2002 - 12:22:56 EDT
Greetings all. My name is alex, and I'm new to the list.
I just picked up/pieced together this used TP600/266 recently, and I afraid I
made a nonrepairable mistake with the BIOS.
After piecing together the TP600 (had core but no periferals), I lowleveled a
HD and installed litestep over win98se. I was seeing the characteristic
errors associated with an outdated BIOS under win98 (modem not detecting
properly, bus mastering, etc), so I decided to update the BIOS to the current
version on ibm's support site. Sounds fine so far, right?
Well, here's where I made the mistake. I only had a Zip and CDRom, no floppy
or PCMCIA storage, so I attempted to make a bootable CD image of the BIOS
updater disk. The TP600 wouldn't recognize the cd properly, and after several
attempts, both burning and loading, I figured that was not going to work. I
loaded the information from the BIOS updater onto my HD and rebooted to DOS
using a Win98 bootable cd. From there (idiotically), I ran the command.com
for the updater and proceeded to "update" my BIOS. I guess the updater must
use absolute memory addressing or something, and having DOS running scewed the
pointers a bit.
After the "update" I was instructed to power down the machine and reboot while
pressing F1 to enter the BIOS menu, but nothing happened. The power light and
the light all the way to the right light up (HDD activity light??) and the fan
spins, but nothing else happens. There is nothing displayed on the screen,
and no audible HDD activity.
Judging from the ibm TP service manual, I have badly corrupted my BIOS and
need a new system board.
This computer is basically a project computer that I do some coding and
small-scale compiling on, but I would like to find out if there is an
inexpensive fix before I scrap the guts and attempt to wire the TFT in my
truck.
Can the BIOS IC be removed and a new one reinstalled?? Do I really need an
entire new main system board (I have to check the TFT size, as the par #'s are
different for different TFT's)?
Anyone have a TP600 BIOS that they want to part with?? Is there any way to
recover from this mistake??
Thanks in advance.
-ace
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