Old laptop on it's deathbed...

[BC_Programmer]

In an attempt to solve somebody elses issue (Harry 48 was looking for a jigsaw program) I booted up my old thinkpad seeking the Visual Basic version 2 sample program, aptly named "JIGSAW".

First, I was greeted with the familar password prompt. So I started typing the password. oddly, the m key produced two password characters, and some of the other keys produced none. Not surprisingly it wouldn't allow me to start.

So I opened it up to discover the battery's little cloth puller-upper soaked in acid- (that was the only location where the leaked acid was) so I removed the battery. same keyboard issue. So I tried an external keyboard- success! I was able to enter the password, select the start mode, and then hang when it tried to load the mwave sound drivers. 

No problem, I thought- I'll just skip the startup files. No luck, for some reason this threw up a "divide error"...

Attempting to boot from a bootable disc yielded non-system disk or disk error.

this laptop was started successfully about a month ago- and now it seems to have no end to issues. The main one obviously being something wrong with the keyboard.


Ahh- yes of course,  I should be providing some information about the machine:

IBM Thinkpad 755CDV
75 Mhz Pentium, 8MB of RAM
1.6 GB Hard drive
PC-DOS 2000 and Windows 3.1

Since the battery has been useless since I got it I was essentially storing it in there. it refused to charge anyway- and the AC adapter broke over a year and a half ago, leaving me to use it through my IBM DOCK I; which helps since I needed to use that to plug in the external keyboard.


Any advice as to what could be causing these seemingly random issues? Most troubling being the "divide error" when trying to skip startup files...

[Broni]

I opened it up to discover the battery's little cloth puller-upper soaked in acid

Some internal spill maybe?

[BC_Programmer]

perhaps, the cloth tab used to pull it out was fairly close to the ribbon from the keyboard, which is the access point (the keyboard flips up to reveal all the innards. I did't see anything. really it's the "divide overflow" error that concerns me, because I cannot possibly know the source... it seems to error out instead of displaying the C:\> prompt. I will try a bootable DOS disk, and see if I get the same error.

[BC_Programmer]

well, I managed to find an old DOS 6 boot disk, and it shows the prompt...


but the keyboard seems to be... well not working, to say the least.

the "m" key, for example, yields "mv" at the prompt, "Enter" yields both enter and then "c" on the next prompt, pressing backspace is the same as pressing F3...

arrgh.


a pic of some of the innards- a little hard to tell anything but it wasn't a huge acid everywhere leak.




not very helpful, I know.


made some changes to config.sys and autoexec.bat to prevent it from loading the sound driver that hung it, and now it hangs on a different driver... skipping the startup files now yields a reboot...

DOS is just so much fun... 

[BC_Programmer]

new revelations regarding the laptop...


oddly- I started it to try to copy specific files off of it, and used a boot-floppy.

Without thinking I used to laptops keyboard to type the password... and it worked fine!


the boot-disk still froze while booting up, though. I managed to get a prompt by skipping the startup files with F5, though.



Encouraged, I decided to step through each line of config.sys and autoexec.bat.


I managed to narrow down the cause to something in my autoexec.bat, either that, or the $IBMHIPD.SYS driver, for external keyboards (which oddly isn't necessary to use a external keyboard anyway).

I decided to run our pal, chkdsk, as we speak it has encountered a few allocation errors in a few fairly random text files, cross-linked files, and so forth.


appears to hang on all sorts of drivers and so forth... I might need to do a reformat for the first time on this fellow in 12 years...