Luca's X20 adventures

[donluca]

Today I received my X20 and... well, let's say it's in rough shape.
Aesthetically it has the usual scratches and small dents you'd expect but other than that:

- The battery is shot
- The screen has a strange halo
- Windows XP installed (twice!)
- Palmrest completely sticky

For the battery I can't do much.

The screen is really strange.
Outside it's clean, so maybe the dirt is inside?

Here are some pictures, although it's really hard to capture it on camera:













Apart from the halo, the screen is nice and bright and looks great.

As for Windows XP, I want to restore the original Windows98SE installation and I see that a gentleman has a thread with several restore CDs available, so I hope I'll be able to write enough meaningful messages and contribute to the community so I can then go and ask him if he's willing to share the dumps of the X20 recovery CD.

I've tried restoring an HD image of a Thinkpad A21m (which is very similar to my X20) taken from archive.org to no avail: it throws an error saying it wasn't able to restore.

The palmrest sticky situation: diluted alchool, lots of clean tissues and A LOT of patience. And I mean A LOT.
I have now scraped the outer sticky layer and the palmrest is nice, clean and smooth.
There are other parts which are sticky but I'll take care of them at another time.

I'm still waiting for the power supply, so in the meantime I've hooked it up to my bench power supply and to my surprise, I've seen so far only a single spike up to 30W!
This would mean that the smaller and lighter 54W PSU would be perfectly adequate, but first I'd like to stress the system with a benchmark to see how much power consumption goes up.

Here's a video of the boot process with power consumption shown in real time:

https://youtu.be/qJm2ImE8KlE

Meanwhile... does anyone know here how to disassemble the front bezel of the LCD to see if there's dirt inside?

[RealBlackStuff]

Check the HMM-Manuals link at the top of this page.

[donluca]

Thanks, I had already downloaded it from elsewhere!

Anyway, this should've been titled the MISadventures of Luca.

After hopelessly trying to boot from USB CD and USB Floppy to install Windows 98 I gave up.
They worked incredibly unreliably, sometime they would boot, then crash, other times they won't start at all, and sometimes they'd start booting and then throw a read error.

I think the issue is that the USB ports aren't providing enough power...

Meanwhile, another, more serious issue arose: the keyboard stopped working.
Kinda.

The only keys that would work were the "num pad" keys and there was no way to disable the num lock.

Still, I decided to press on and installed DOS by connecting the internal Hard Drive via USB to my Macbook, booted a Windows VM and used Rufus to install DOS onto it.
Then I copied all the Windows 98 CD files onto the disk, put it back into the X20, booted from the hard drive and started the setup.
Everything went nice and smoothly.

And then it wouldn't boot at all, angry beeps galore.

I tried getting into the BIOS and a message pop up saying that there was an error regarding a "Stuck key".
I managed to get past it and boot into Windows 98 and opened Notepad and there was my issue: the B key was stuck, it was as if it was always pressed.
I tried pressing it several times and then it stopped working altogether.
But from time to time, it would press itself and get stuck.

I turned off the X20, removed the keyboard and inspected it and everything seemed fine.
I then tried everything but to no avail.

As a last, desperate measure, I took out my contact cleaner, removed the B keycap and blasted underneath it.
It worked.
Kind of.
Suddenly the B key was working again when pressed, but sometimes it would get stuck again.
I furiously started pressing it as it would work the contact cleaner deeper and it was getting better and better.
And then the N key stopped working.
Same thing: removed keycap, blasted with contact cleaner and it sprung back to life.

I kept doing this with other keys as well because when I pressed them they would also press the B or N key with them.
Some dirt must have gone underneath them and cause some kind of short or false press, I honestly don't know.

Now I finally have unstuck the B key and it seems that everything works alright.

But of course something else broke: the left hinge of the monitor (which already looked incredibly suspect when I got the X20).





But now it's late and I'm honestly incredibly tired.
I haven't even installed any drivers in Windows 98.

Tomorrow I'll be back at it and I'll dismantle the monitor assembly and see if I can fix the hinge.
And, most importantly, remove the bezel and see if I can clean the inside of the screen (if that's the issue, of course).

Hopefully there won't be any more bad surprises.

[donluca]

...and then things got worse.

The part of the hinge that is broken is the metal one.

Don't even ask me how that could have happened.
I tried to superglue the broken pieces back but it was useless, so I just removed them so at least I can now properly close the laptop.

The LCD is basically an entire piece and I have no idea how to properly dismantle it to clean it inside, so to avoid further damage I decided to leave it as it is.
The hardware maintenance manual doesn't mention it unfortunately.

Now, for some unknown reason, the right button mouse has stopped working.
At this point I'm pretty sure that it is just dirt that got inside so I'll remove the keyboard assembly thing once again and clean it and hopefully that will do the trick.

I've installed some generic Audio and Video drivers and everything is working right, I don't see anything strange.

There are some missing drivers that I have absolutely no clue what they are, so I think that I'll try to contact the person that has all the recovery CDs and hopefully he'll send me the ones for the X20 so I can just reinstall everything with all the necessary drivers.

I'm seriously considering looking around for another X20 with a good screen as the halos around are pretty distracting.

[donluca]

And now even the mouse left button isn't working anymore.

Only the middle button and the trackpoint "press".

I've tried to clean it as best as I could but I could see that there was grime within, inside the membrane between the button and the PCB.
I couldn't reach inside there.

I'm definitely going to look for another X20 at this point, I'm afraid that this is far too gone.

Even the ESC and Enter keys are now working intermittently.

[donluca]

Alright, let's try and inject some positivity into this mess.

I bought this X20 as a retrogaming machine to play old 1995-1999 games that I used to play with my dad when I was a kid, so how is it faring?

Pretty well!

Unfortunately I couldn't manage to use ATI's proprietary CIF API work: Tomb Raider and Croc either crash or have severe texture corruption.
This could be due to the ATI Rage Mobile M being a bit too new and not supporting this fully.

Switching to D3D things went much better! Croc can use D3D with a patch and it works at full resolution, all graphic settings turned to max and it runs flawlessly.
I forgot how beautiful and colorful this game is!

Next up is Shipwreckers! (known also as Overboard!). This was an old Playstation 1 title which I always loved and, again, it works without issues with D3D at 800x600 with all the graphic settings turned up.
Just some small hiccup from time to time.

Thief: The Dark Age also works great, everything set to max and framerate is buttery smooth at 800x600.

I really needed this breath of fresh air.
Now I'm playing around with Audio drivers because VXD drivers unfortunately won't support playing CD Audio for games, so I had to switch to a newer WDM and messed up the system, now it doesn't want to boot anymore, lol.

I have to say I didn't miss the Windows 98 times at all, with the buggy drivers and whatnot.

Anyway, let's conclude this day with this positive note and let's hope this X20 doesn't die on me randomly.

[donluca]

I've just discovered that as per
https://archive.org/download/ibm-thinkp ... 3P3327.pdf
the recovery CD of the Thinkpad Transnote *should* be the same as the X20 (minus the touchscreen stuff) and if we compare the two via
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PD ... awbook.pdf
by checking pages 56 and 80, we can see that the hardware is identical (again, minus the touchscreen).

The biggest issues are now two:

1 - I can't find a USB floppy or USB CD that works with my X20
2 - Even if I found one, I tried booting on another machine and the recovery CD looks for very specific USB or PCMCIA CDRom drives and none of the one I own are compatible

This means that the recovery CD for the X20 are completely useless to me.

The only way out is one: can anyone with a Transnote or a X20 kindly make an image of their own hard drive with the recovery partition intact and send it to me?

Otherwise I'll have to live with my half-assed Windows 98 installation. Which is not the end of the world: it works, but I'd love to restore this X20 to its original software.

If you have an X20, please get in touch!

EDIT: Actually... there's a glimmer of hope.

If you look at page 4 of the first document I linked, you'll see a section named "External CD ROM not supported by the startable diskette".
So it *is* possible to use unsupported CD ROM drives!
The issue is finding the mentioned Recovery Boot Diskette for the X20... but I've already found it and it's available for download here!
https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkpad- ... m/X20.html
(search for "USB recovery diskette")
This opens up a lot of possibilities.

My plan for tomorrow (today is late) is to spin up a VirtualBox virtual machine targeting Windows 98, create a RAW disk of 10GB (same as my hard drive) and modify the recovery diskette with the VirtualBox CD drivers, load the Recovery CD and hopefully let it run.
I really hope there are no hardware checks.
If there are none, then I should have the virtual hard drive fully recovered and I just have to image it back to my X20 hard disk and it is done!

Fingers crossed!

[donluca]

Well, that was a failure, it all worked until the CD booted and I was greeted with an error stating that the Recovery CD was incompatible with the BIOS of the machine.

I guess I'll have to find a DOS driver that works with one of my USB CD ROM drives and do it straight on the X20.

[RealBlackStuff]

Have you tried updating BIOS and EC (from: https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkpad- ... m/X20.html )?

[donluca]

Yes, that was the first thing I did when I got the X20

[donluca]

A small update: I made some progress.

By hacking the restore image, I was able to boot off the CD, but there was one very strange thing: when the restore process started, it didn't format and repartition my hard drive.
It left it as it was.

Then it proceeded to unpack all the various files... and that was it.
I had just a simple DOS installed on the internal hard drive and while the Windows files were there, Windows didn't boot.

It seems like the partition program failed to repartition and format the hard drive.
The big issue I have is that I absolutely need the internal hard drive to be formatted and readable because I need two files which are the drivers for my USB CD Rom drive.

Now I've reinstalled "plain" Windows 98 and am doing the restore process, hoping that it will overwrite the current Windows 98 installation and that will give me an almost completely restored system, albeit with not recover partition.

Fingers crossed!

[donluca]

I finally did it.

It has been fully restored, hidden recover partition and everything, and it is now installing the various bloatware IBM loaded this with.

I'm exhausted, tomorrow I'll probably do a complete writeup on how I managed to pull this off.
It wasn't easy, it wasn't fast and sure as hell it wasn't fun.

As soon as the installation completes I'm going to image the hard drive and store it somewhere safe because I'm never going to go through all of this ever again.

[RealBlackStuff]

Congratulations after all your hard work!

[donluca]

Alright, here's how I did it, I wonder if I should write this in a dedicated topic.
Eventually I can just copy-paste the post in another thread.

How to restore your X20 with a USB CD ROM.

There are three types of USB CD ROM, Thinkpad wise.

A - Not recognized by the BIOS, not working even with DOS drivers: I have one of these and I'm afraid that it is trying to pull too much current from the USB port, so it is not working properly. Nothing that can be done.

B - Not recognized by the BIOS, working with DOS drivers: if you try to boot it from the BIOS it won't work, but if you load the drivers from DOS then it will work.

C - Recognized by the BIOS, working with DOS drivers: BIOS boots off the CD, but then you'll need either the built-in drivers of the recovery CD or custom drivers.

Unfortunately you'll need a USB CD ROM of the C type for this.
If it is supported by the drivers supplied with the recovery CD, then you're set.
If not, read on...

Other than the CD drive, unfortunately the only accessible drive you have in DOS is the Hard Disk.

The IBM Thinkpad Transnote Recovery CD will work fine with the X20, you'll just have some extra programs which are related to the touchscreen that you can remove after you've completed the recovery.
They both have the exact same hardware, minus the touch screen.

To start off, you'll have to format the internal X20 hard disk to FAT32 and copy the USB CD ROM DOS drivers you need.
You can find them here:
USBASPI.sys https://hddguru.com/software/2006.02.09 ... OS-Driver/
usbcd*.sys https://www.hiren.info/downloads/dos-files
You're going to need both of them.
There are several usbcd*.sys files, you have to discover which one works with your drive.

We're also going to need an app to nuke the whole MBR, you can get it here:
http://support.fccps.cz/download/adv/frr/wipembr.html

Remove the hard drive from the X20, plug it into a PC/Mac with a IDE-to-USB adapter and format it with a MBR style partition table and a FAT32 partition.
_______________________________REPEAT____________________________________
| Copy USBASPI.sys, all the usbcd*.sys and wipembr.exe from your PC/Mac to the X20 Hard Drive.
|
| Put the HD back into the X20, plug your CD drive and start the machine with the Recovery CD in.
| When it boots, make sure that you go into the BIOS and put both CD ROM and External Device before the HD in the boot order.
| Save and reboot.
| Your X20 should boot from the CD. If it doesn't (like mine), press CTRL+ALT+DEL to reboot and now it should work (don't ask).
|
| Choose any CD Drive from the menu, it won't matter, you'll end up in a command prompt because it cannot find a useable CD drive.
| Now, first thing, you have to load the ASPI driver.
|

Code: Select all

dynaload C:\usbaspi.sys /w /v

| and press Enter when it asks.
| It should scan your USB devices and pick up your CD Drive.
| Sometimes it fails throwing an error.
| If it does, try again and the second or third time should work.
|
| Now you have to try the various usbcd*.sys drivers
|

Code: Select all

dynaload C:\usbcd1.sys /D:oemcd001

| You should either see your CD drive or something like "nothing found" or an error.
| Keep trying the various usbcd*.sys until you find one that works for you.
|
| After that
|

Code: Select all

LH mscdex.exe /D:oemcd001 /L:X

| And now you should be able to access the CD Drive.
|
| Now we have to restart the recovery CD but not from the start:
|

Code: Select all

edit autoexec.bat

| Now press SHIFT and keep it pressed and start pressing the down arrow to select everything until you reach the line above ":NOWGO".
| Press Delete to delete everything you've selected.
| Press ALT+F and S to save.
| Press ALT+F and X to exit.
_______________________________REPEAT____________________________________

Now a very important part which drove me crazy because the recovery wasn't working for me: we have the zero out the MBR of the hard drive or the recovery program won't be able to correctly make the partitions and recover everything.

Copy wipembr.exe to the Smart Drive you're on (it should be either D: or E: or something like that. You can see it on the screen.)

Code: Select all

copy C:\wipembr.exe D:

(if needed, replace D: with the smart drive letter)

Launch wimpembr

Code: Select all

wipembr.exe

Now you have to select the correct drive (it should be "80", but check carefully) and then the option "d".

_______________________________REPEAT____________________________________
| Finally we can start the recovery process again.
|

Code: Select all

autoexec.bat

_______________________________REPEAT____________________________________

It will start the recovery process and, unfortunately, throughout the process you'll have to reboot several times.
And every time you reboot you'll have to copy the USB CD drivers to the hard disk (because it's probably going to be wiped) and load them again.
Did you see the _REPEAT_ thing?
That's the steps you'll have to redo at every reboot.

Eventually everything should be finally restored, including the hidden partitions.

EDIT: wanted to add that this process should work with all Thinkpads that don't have a CD drive and are old enough that have issues booting natively from CD and you have to install Windows 98.

If you have a USB Floppy drive that is recognized and works this is all much simpler as you can just put the USB CD Drives on the floppy and modify the autoexec.bat accordingly.

[donluca]

And just as I wrote all that... I've found the hook function in the Recovery CD to modify it so I can load all the drivers I wanted.
Sigh.

If anyone wants, I can create a custom CD image with the generic USB drivers integrated.
Just ask.

[donluca]

...and the X20 is now dead.

It smells really bad, as if something has burned.

I've tried contacting the seller and he has clearly scammed me: he became really aggressive as he probably knew well this X20 was on its last legs and is now even threatening me with legal action over defamation as I left a negative feedback on his eBay account after he told me he wouldn't give me back any money.

Oh well... I guess it's back to the hunt for a working X20/X21, as I have already bought an original PSU and docking station that I have no use for.

Sad times.