[Thinkpad] Thinkpad 240/240X HDD direct swap

Hey kids. Currently trying to swap the lower chassis of a 300Mhz
Celeron Thinkpad 240 (2609-21U US model) with the lower chassis of the P3
500MHz Thinkpad 240X (2601-62U US Model). Ran into some oddities.

1) The LCD swap directly from the 240 unit to the 240X unit, which is
semi-surprising. And the thing with the 240 is that the Type-A (Sharp
LQ104) LCD connector is very loose on the LCD side. People with 240
screens that flickers should reseat the main connector on the LCD end and
tape it down.

2) The 16 chip 256MB memory that was recommended for getting the 240 to
320MB of memory is kinda sketchy in the 240Xs. In my 240X the memory
count only up to 256MB, which means that something disabled the Bank of
64MB memory that is built onto the 240X motherboard. That might be a BIOS
issue since I am only running BIOS version 1.03, not the latest 1.09.
I did not see anything on the 440MX chipset datasheet which might indicate
different behavior from the memory management inside the 440BX chipset of
the 240. I guess I'll have to flash to 1.09 and see if that extra 64MB of
RAM would magically re-appear.

3) In general, the 240X chassis looks promising, since it did not yield
any weird surprises. However, there is a Win2K related issue. I was
trying to avoid formatting the HDD on the 240 and reinstalling Win2K on
the 240X, so I uninstalled the video/audio/USB hub/Northbridge/Southbridge
drivers in the Win2K device manager, and then tossed the HDD from the 240
chassis to the 240X. The machine booted, went into Win2K's text loadup
mode, and just before the Graphics mode in the bootup process shows up, it
locks up. No response to Capslock/Scrolllock/NumLock, but the Volume
controls still work. When I used the F8/Safe mode bootup, I traced the
bootup snag to a lockup directly after mup.sys. Is this to be expected
when the HDD is transferred from one laptop to another in this fashion,
is this a known BIOS snag, or is that board flaky? What should be the
next step? I plan to flash the BIOS to 1.09 tomorrow, run diagnostics
using IBM PC Doctor and then see if the Windows bootup will still trip up.
Should I consider formatting the HDD and reinstalling Windows 2000 on the
240X chassis?

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Received on Fri Aug 27 01:10:55 2004