Upgrading BIOS in Thinkpad without a floppy drive

[J. Spaceman]

My sister bought herself a new laptop last week and gave me her old IBM Thinkpad 770ED. It doesn't have a floppy drive on it, just a CD/DVD combo drive. I'm not sure if it ever had a floppy, the laptop wasn't originally my sister's either; she got it from her old law firm and whoever owned it before her must've removed the floppy drive.

Anyways. . .I want to upgrade the BIOS on this thing, as I want to install Linux on it and from what I've read at the IBM support site, which can be found here, (http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&context=SP00QVF&q=&uid=psg1DSHY-3P2MCB&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&cc=us&lang=en) you need to have the latest BIOS installed in order to fix some bugs to get Linux working.

However, the above www page says that you need a floppy drive in order to flash the BIOS. Can it be done without a floppy drive? Could I burn a bootable DOS CD on my desktop, then boot up the laptop using this CD and try flashing the BIOS through there?

Any other suggestions? Or do I have to track down an old Thinkpad floppy drive?

[SkyDog]

I'd guess the CD would work, but I don't know if I'd want to take the chance. (If it fries the BIOS, your 'new' Thinkpad is a paperweight!) If the hard drive is capable of booting to just a command prompt, I'm pretty certain you can update the BIOS from there -- I'm pretty sure I've done that on a 770 before.

There's one other catch about updating the BIOS on a ThinkPad: You need to have a charged battery installed, or else the BIOS won't let you update. (The people who wrote the BIOS update program didn't want to take a chance that the laptop might come unplugged while you're running the BIOS update.)

If you do wind up having to use a floppy, you'll need the floppy drive that either swaps out with the CD-ROM drive or connects to the little d-sub floppy port. You won't be able to use a USB one to update the BIOS. If you can find an external floppy drive for either a Thinkpad 770 or 600, it'll work with your system. If you find an internal drive, it has to be for the 770.

You can actually find external floppy drives you can use relatively cheap on ebay. I'd offer to lend you mine if you were local! ;)

[J. Spaceman]

I'd guess the CD would work, but I don't know if I'd want to take the chance. (If it fries the BIOS, your 'new' Thinkpad is a paperweight!) If the hard drive is capable of booting to just a command prompt, I'm pretty certain you can update the BIOS from there -- I'm pretty sure I've done that on a 770 before.

How would I go about getting the hard drive to boot to just a command prompt? Would I have to install DOS from a CD and then use that to run the flash utility?

Could I just make a bootable DOS utility CD, and also put the flash utility and new BIOS files on it as well, and then boot the computer up with that and flash it from the command prompt?

[J. Spaceman]

I managed to borrow an IBM external floppy drive (model # 05K6187) from a prof. at school. It plugs into the parallel port of the laptop. Would this work? Is there someplace in the BIOS where I can enable the parallel port, as I don't think it is presently enabled?

[SkyDog]

The 770 doesn't use a parallel port floppy drive, so I doubt the one you borrowed will work.

Is there an OS on the laptop currently? If it's some version of Windows 9x, you can get that to boot to a command prompt (F5, F8, or hold the Ctrl key during boot) and update the BIOS from there. Otherwise, maybe you could boot to a DOS utility CD and do a "format /s" or "sys c:" on the hard drive so that you can boot to a command prompt.

In theory, you could probably boot to a CD and update the BIOS from there. But I remember reading some laptop makers' documentation that specifically says not to do that, and I'm not brave enough to turn a perfectly good laptop into a paperweight!

As for enabling/disabling the parallel port, there's actually a "Thinkpad Configuration Utility" that runs within Windows that changes BIOS & port settings. (I don't know offhand if there's a DOS or *nix version of that utility.)