Thinkpads Forum

Hello

I have in my possession an old IBM Thinkpad 560 in pretty rough shape but it works. Sadly I don't have any accessories and the only way I see on internet to update it is through external floppy drive. So have a question...is there a program or any other way to flash it? Besides reprogramming it with programmer?

I've seen some hacked versions of bios update software, but not for 560, unfortunately. However those have just battery check removed. So getting an external fdd is probably the way to go.
But i'm just curious, is there any specific need to update the bios of your 560?
BTW 560 can also boot from pcmcia cf/ata storage. Does the update software work only on a fdd, or any boot device will do? Let alone did you try running it from the hdd?

The last version (1.20) for 560 adds win98 support. So it mainly add bigger hdd capacity support that I care the most, with some others things. I just hope it will fix the unexpected behaviour that no matter what I do, laptop just refuses to boot anything (even when I want to install ms-dos) but somehow it runs hdd with win95 that I have already installed on it.
I believe the update only works on fdd. I extracted files to hdd from iso and software works but it doesn't do anything sadly. It just closes without any changes after pressing Y (I tried it under windows and ms-dos). I don't have anything with pcmcia besides the wifi/usb that wont work on that laptop so maybe it will work but I'm not sure.

The only thing I can think of trying is to find some old linux distro and try to flash it that way. (Idk if its even possible) or try to flash it with programmer.

Even tho I know how to do stuff on modern computers, I lack information about old ones...so I'm kind of in the dark here.