[geeks] Thinkpads

[Phil Stracchino]

Cymru's Thinkpad 600E had a child-induced accident recently, from which
I was able to bring it back to life for a few hours, but over the course
of about its next three hours of run time the screen progressively
failed.  After a few abortive attempts to pick up a Thinkpad T20 on eBay
for a price she was willing to pay, we picked up another Thinkpad 600E
in non-booting condition for parts, intending to do a screen swap and
see if I could transplant the faster CPU (366MHz vs. 266MHz) into her
Thinkpad.

Naturally, when it arrived (with CDROM drive and a recovery CD left in
it, but without hard disk or battery), the first thing I wanted to do
was verify the reported condition, so I pulled out all the expansion RAM
in case that was bad, popped in Cymru's disk and battery, and powered it
on.  As advertizsed, it dod not boot; it failed POST with two errors,
codes 161 and 163.




On a Thinkpad 600E, those codes are "dead CMOS battery" and "time and
date not set".  :)

Tore apart the old Thinkpad to find where IBM hid the CMOS battery (5-10
minutes)
Swapped it into the new Thinkpad (30 seconds)
Set time and date (1 minute)
Ejected the IBM recovery CD from the CDROM drive (5 seconds)
Rebooted, and presto, booted straight into Slackware without a hiccup.  :)


Installing Debian on the Thinkpad i1300 ... not so good.  The kernel on
the NETINST CD is built without the ALi IDE chipset bug workaround, and
without that, it's just not flying.  It'll boot from the internal CD,
but once booted, won't recognize it even with all ide devices manually
set to ata66, and refuses to mount it as an installer source.  I was
able to work around this by duplicating the contents of the ISO to a USB
stick, booting from the CD, then manually mounting the USB stick on the
cdrom mountpoint and loading the installer from there, but the install
process dies at debootstrap because it can't determine the release
codename.  I'm currently working on creating a modified NETINST ISO with
a kernel built with the ALi IDE chipset patch.


-- 
        Phil Stracchino                CDK#2
 Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net   alaric at caerllewys.net
 Landline: 603-429-0220           Mobile: 603-320-5438
        It's not the years, it's the mileage.