[Thinkpad] A20M DARA HDD Firmware Update Failure

I received an IBM Support Flash Email that noted:

2003-05-27 TP General - Hard disk drive Firmware Update utility diskette
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=psg1MIGR-41008&rs=260

I decided to go to that page and update my HDD firmware.
The page says that for my DARA series HDD, I should use:
  fwhd2802.exe

Unfortunately, this DOS bootable diskette did not successfully boot up for
me. It seems to have hung when it started processing autoexec.bat. I did
try to rebuild it a few times to no avail.

Even more unfortunately, when it hung, my W2K
C:\WINNT\system32\config\system file became unusable to W2K.
That rendered W2K ***UNBOOTABLE***. I couldn't even get to F8 or the
recovery console without booting from CD.

I'm 6 hours into figuring this all out and fixing my machine. It's not
pretty.

I did discover that a workaround to fwhd2802.exe being flakey is to run
fwhd2812.exe, which will ask for fwhd2802 if it needs it. fwhd2812.exe
boots to DOS and works just fine.

Yours truly,
Bob Meizlik
President
Squak Mountain Consulting, Inc.
206-605-5558
bob@squakmt.com
www.squakmt.com

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Received on Sat May 31 05:41:16 2003