The Thinkpad is dead. Long live the Thinkpad!

As I think I mentioned a while back, cymrullewes' Slackware-11-running Thinkpad 600E, llioness, got dropped and suffered a mischief to something in its screen.  We looked at a couple of replacement screens on eBay, found and bid on a couple of Thinkpad T20s but got outbid handily on them, then took the chance on a Thinkpad 600E listed as "doesn't boot, throws POST errors", purchased for a parts-donor price for the screen.  Just like cymrullewes' old one, but 100MHz faster (366MHz vs. 266MHz).

So, it arrived today, bare machine sans battery and disk (but with 160MB of RAM and a CDROM drive) and, out of constructive paranoia, the first thing we did was pull out all the expansion RAM, pop in the good disk and battery from the old Thinkpad, and see if it'd boot.  Sure enough, it threw POST error codes 161 and 163.

Turns out 161 is "dead CMOS battery", and 163 is "time and date not set" (DUH, given 161).  Five minutes or so to tear the old laptop apart and find the CMOS battery, 30 seconds to swap it into the new machine, install the rest of the RAM, set time and date, pop out the copied IBM recovery CD left behind in the CDROM drive, reboot, and it booted straight into Slackware without so much as a hiccup.

We can rebuild it.  Better, faster, stronger ... we have the technology.  But it's so much easier to just do a mind transplant.  :)