[GLLUG] Thinkpad BIOS

[Richard Houser]

Bios used to have limits on what they talked to for boot purposes.
Offhand, I think on threshold was 8gb.  Drives either had special hardware
compatibility modes via jumper or real mode bios routines to get around
that.
On Mar 7, 2012 10:22 PM, "Chick Tower" <c.e.tower at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have an old IBM Thinkpad T20.  It's a 650MHz PIII with 256MB of RAM. It
> was built in Mexico, probably in July of 2000.  The CMOS battery is dead,
> so when it starts I enter the BIOS and put in the correct time and date.
>  The hard drive originally had Win95 or Win98 on it, but I replaced it with
> Linux and it works fine.
>
> It only has a 6GB hard drive, so I replaced it with a larger hard drive
> that currently has FreeBSD 7.2 installed on it.  When I boot the Thinkpad
> with the new hard drive, I can still select to enter the BIOS, and it says
> it's loading the BIOS configuration utility, but it never brings up the
> screen.  Well, it doesn't within ten minutes, which is at least ten times
> longer than it usually takes.  I don't get an error message of any kind,
> just the normal "loading BIOS configuration" message.  When I replace the
> original drive it boots as it did before.
>
> Without going to any trouble to look for an answer, does anyone know if
> IBM Thinkpads ever used to store part of the BIOS or the utility to modify
> it on the hard drive?
> --
>
>                               Chick
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