kurt18947
June 7th, 2015, 03:16 PM
I have once again come to appreciate the usability of Ubuntu and its kin. I had an R61 Thinkpad listed for sale on a local want-ads site. I got a legitimate inquiry, prospective purchaser lived nearby so began to restore it to factory default. It came with Windows Vista and I had the factory restore disks so no problem, right? HAH!
I started out running DBAN (couldn't get HDPARM to work for some reason). I started feeding is CDs and all was proceeding apace. About 50 minutes into the process, I got a “bootmgr.exe not found” message. Huh? A google search found one cause was the hard drive not being listed as the first boot device. I'd changed the boot order to make USB devices first. I'd restored the BIOS to default but no problem, made the HD the first boot device and started the process again. That error message went away but another took its place. I googled and tried a few different things, taking about 1 hour per try. No luck.
I finally threw my hands up, called the prospective purchaser. I explained the situation and offered to either install Win7 in demo mode that would expire in 30 days or install XP. In talking to him I was pretty sure installing a linux distro would not work. I explained about XP being out of support but he said go ahead. XP installed with no issues though I'd forgotten where most of the controls were found so that took a while. I'd also forgotten the joy of having virtually NO drivers installed by default. Lenovo has a tool that when run a few times will install the proper drivers. In order for this to work, I needed a network connection. Off to Lenovo's web site. I found several ethernet and wifi drivers for that model. None of them worked. I finally downloaded the windows driver for a Trendnet USB wifi device and was then able to run the Lenovo update tool.
Most of the drivers installed properly, except the WiFI. I knew from lspci that it was an Intel 3945 so off to Intel's site to download there. Intel's site told me that driver had moved but seemed to have left no forwarding address. I then tried download.com but that insisted I download a bunch of other crap too. I finally did find a source that seemed clean. Installed that and most things worked. Fingerprint reader & smbus driver didn't but I was tired of messing with it. Guy came, tried it, paid and left. I had started at 6 a.m. (0600) and the thing left the house at 6:30 p.m. (1830) I sold the machine for $40, the display was getting dim and ethernet port was occasionally flaky. I wonder how much I made per hour?
Thanks, I feel better.:) This machine had numerous linux flavors installed and none took longer than about 20 minutes to get to the same state.
I started out running DBAN (couldn't get HDPARM to work for some reason). I started feeding is CDs and all was proceeding apace. About 50 minutes into the process, I got a “bootmgr.exe not found” message. Huh? A google search found one cause was the hard drive not being listed as the first boot device. I'd changed the boot order to make USB devices first. I'd restored the BIOS to default but no problem, made the HD the first boot device and started the process again. That error message went away but another took its place. I googled and tried a few different things, taking about 1 hour per try. No luck.
I finally threw my hands up, called the prospective purchaser. I explained the situation and offered to either install Win7 in demo mode that would expire in 30 days or install XP. In talking to him I was pretty sure installing a linux distro would not work. I explained about XP being out of support but he said go ahead. XP installed with no issues though I'd forgotten where most of the controls were found so that took a while. I'd also forgotten the joy of having virtually NO drivers installed by default. Lenovo has a tool that when run a few times will install the proper drivers. In order for this to work, I needed a network connection. Off to Lenovo's web site. I found several ethernet and wifi drivers for that model. None of them worked. I finally downloaded the windows driver for a Trendnet USB wifi device and was then able to run the Lenovo update tool.
Most of the drivers installed properly, except the WiFI. I knew from lspci that it was an Intel 3945 so off to Intel's site to download there. Intel's site told me that driver had moved but seemed to have left no forwarding address. I then tried download.com but that insisted I download a bunch of other crap too. I finally did find a source that seemed clean. Installed that and most things worked. Fingerprint reader & smbus driver didn't but I was tired of messing with it. Guy came, tried it, paid and left. I had started at 6 a.m. (0600) and the thing left the house at 6:30 p.m. (1830) I sold the machine for $40, the display was getting dim and ethernet port was occasionally flaky. I wonder how much I made per hour?
Thanks, I feel better.:) This machine had numerous linux flavors installed and none took longer than about 20 minutes to get to the same state.