taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Argh. My Thinkpad’s power socket must have received a knock during the move. It no longer works with either of the two power bricks I have here — so it looks like it’s time to either (a) buy a soldering iron and some screwdrivers (incl Torx ones?) or (b) renew my IBM warranty service and send it in for some fixing :(

Bad timing.

Update: oh look, it’s working again! phew. I guess I should probably set aside some time for warranty service here anyway though…

Tags: hardware, hassle, ibm, laptops, thinkpad

Tech: Troubleshooters: Making a bootable CD from a bootable floppy image.
Making a note of this for future reference — it should be handy next time I need to do a BIOS or firmware upgrade on my Thinkpad.

I ran into the need for this recently when trying to upgrade the BIOS on my Thinkpad running Linux, so hibernation would work. IBM don’t provide BIOS upgrade tools for Linux, so you have to keep a Windows partition around. (Yes, I pay the Windows Tax — I’ve been bitten by proprietary firmware upgrades requiring it in the past, as in this case.)

Amazingly, however, even after paying the Tax, the ‘non-diskette’ BIOS upgrade (ie. the standalone Windows app) doesn’t work from Windows XP! Instead, you get a hard hang when it tries to bring the machine down from XP to a single-app mode to perform the upgrade. Running from DOS similarly fails, because the BIOS upgrade app is a WIN32 application. Clever.

Eventually, I wound up reformatting my Windows partition, installing Windows 98 (!), and running the BIOS upgrade app from that worked fine. But next time around, I should be able to save myself a few hours of MCSE imitation by using this floppy-to-CD trick… here’s hoping. ;) PCs Are Hard.

Tags: app, bios, firmware, linux, partition, tax, tech, thinkpad, time, upgrade, windows