Lenovo x61s middleton mod

Discussion in 'BIOS Mods' started by anew_balance08, Dec 21, 2013.

  1. anew_balance08

    anew_balance08 MDL Novice

    Jun 17, 2010
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    #1 anew_balance08, Dec 21, 2013
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    I am attempting to flash the middleton mod for an x61s so the restriction on allowed wifi cards will be gone. I extracted the contents of the middleton mod (I would post the link of where I downloaded it from but I do not have 20 posts yet; source should be reliable) and looked at the README file. I decided to create a bootable CD and flash the BIOS that way. I have the x61s connected to a USB DVD-CD drive, the battery is charged, and the x61s is connected to an AC adapter as well.

    Well I get this message when attempting to boot the CD.

    Code:
    IBM IDE CD-ROM Driver Version 3.20
Copyright (C) IBM Corp., 1994, 2003 All rights reserved
Driver was not installed. CD ROM drive was not found

Device driver not found: 'TPCD001'. 
No valid CDROM device drivers selected. 
Bad command or file name. 
Invalid driver specification. 
Invalid drive in search path. 
Bad command or file name.
    Anyone have any idea why the bootable CD will not run the BIOS update?
     
  2. Mutagen

    Mutagen MDL Addicted

    Feb 18, 2013
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    #2 Mutagen, Dec 22, 2013
    As best I can tell from the specs., the X61s optical drive has SATA connector. It appears the driver you are attempting to use is quite old and is for an IDE interface. Pretty sure that is the issue. BTW, you can use "hxxp://" to post a pseudo link.
     
  3. anew_balance08

    anew_balance08 MDL Novice

    Jun 17, 2010
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    #3 anew_balance08, Dec 28, 2013 (OP)
    Hi Mutagen and thanks for replying :)

    I was able to finally flash the x61s and apparently the x61s I was working on requires it to be docked to flash the BIOS. Those instructions are located on the Lenovo Support website under Bootable CD BIOS Update for the x61s (sorry since I have less than 20 posts I could not provide a link). Scroll down around the middle of the page and the instructions are located under 'Read More' section of the 'BIOS Update Bootable CD.' If you scroll down to the subheader "Requirements" line 5 you will see a line that states "Any types of USB, PC Card, CardBus, PC Card, or ExpressCard Optical Drive are not supported."

    Line 3 then states "To boot the computer from the BIOS Update CD, you should have the following optical drive. Ultrabay slim optical drive installed in the ThinkPad x6 UltraBase."

    Once I followed those directions what I noticed was right before the CD started loading there was some type of confirmation in the MS-DOS environment that indicated a driver was installed. Right after that the Middleton BIOS started the flash automatically and took ~1 minute to complete. Hopefully this will save someone from frustration if they attempt to flash using a USB CD driver as I did initially. This was my first experience where the dock was specifically required to flash a BIOS. From what I hear some x61s may not require the dock to flash but YMMV.
     

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