Ibm Thinkpad 770

A friend of mine has a IBM thinkpad 770 and on start-up he receives an error 8611. IBM website says that it is either the motherboard; on-board mouse; external mouse; etc (long list...lol). He had it on-line and had IBM did ran a diagnostic test and they told him it was a broken wire on the external mouse. Being an electronic tech I didn't hesitate to open and inspect. Upon Visual inspection I could find nothing that looked cracked, bent or broken. Is there a way to bypass the boot-up diagnostic test so windows will load? I am able to boot to dos with a floppy and can find nothing wrong with his windows system (as I thought it might be a bad or disabled driver).
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Steve

boot from an xp cd, and perform some maintenance in there, try repairing the boot sector, it might be a software conflict or driver conflict for that matter, if your already on xp, try a repair install....

have you tried removing the mouse and setting the bios not to halt on post if it is missing?

His system is set to quick boot and when I try F8 or any other keys to get into bios (like you do on most systems) it gives me a 'stuck key error'. This is the first notebook that I have worked on and I think that I may be missing something.
It came with windows 95 and he upgraded to 98.

Edit: I have removed the external mouse and I am going to disconnect the keyboard mouse and see what happens.

I disconnected the on-board mouse and still recieved the same error. It must be a problem with the system board. I am still intrigued on how to get into this things bios though. I tried removing the cmos battery (only 5 min.) and the only thing it did was reset the time and date. I may have to remove it longer as I have seen this happen on some systems.

hmmm, strange, never heard of a case where you couldnt get into bios, obviously youve tried "del"? f8 for me takes me to loading options like safe mode etc..might be an xp thing, i cant remember 98 too well, on saying all this did he get a warranty with ibm if so, off load it on to them, sounds to me like theyre not helping much, the mouse agenda seems balls to me lol, although you never know...

the bios on laptops is the same as on desktops, using stripped out a bit has less settings to play with, bios keys i know of are f2 f10 and del. mine sis f2, i have a compaq latop and gettign intot he bios is the same, the quickboot feature just means its doesnt wait aslon to boot,

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?r...8&cc=us&lang=en

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/search.wss?q=...go.x=15&go.y=14

Thanks for the information, already been there though...lol, I even posted in their forum (its small so I dont think I will get any replies)
I have tried all the F keys and delete, but then it gives me a keyboard error with the 8611 one also.
I have just booted with the floppy and I am in the process of fdisk and format to remove the entire operating system, I'll see how it goes from there.

I've got a feeling that the problem is on the system board though.
I may even download the newer bios and give it a flash.

Still working on it :)
Steve

the newer bios woulda been my 1st call before windows, if u aint done it it seems scary, but beleive me, id rather do that than reinstall

This thing has several problems (I think he dropped it myself...lol) It took 40+ minutes to format a 4G HD so I thought I would do a surface scan and it has more bad clusters than you can shake a stick at :)
I had scandisk fix the errors and tried to continue to load windows and now the cd-rom refuses to read any of my windows disk (cdr 101 error). I think its about time for the trash can myself.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by zack@29 September 2003 - 03:38
u need to reinstall windows!

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That is what I am trying to do.
fdisk--set partition--format and since it took so long to format a 4G HD I thought I would run scandisk and check for surface errors There were several bad clusters on the first pass (didnt count them) and when I ran a 2nd pass it found another 240! My guess is that the hard drive is about to fail.

Just for kicks I thought I would try and install windows 98SE anyways.
I booted with the bootdisk and installed drivers for cd-rom support.
All goes good until I try to read the cd-rom (CDR101, not ready)
My guess is that he had errors and got mad and kicked it.

I am done with it, bummer too, its the first pc that I have not been able to repair.
Since it is a lappy, I dont have any spare parts around to swap in it.

Oh well, thanks to everyone for your time and effort,
Steve