I received the 250 GB Samsung 860 EVO MZ-76E250B drive via Purilator today and cloned my old HDD onto it using Norton Ghost 2003. I left about 120 GB free for a future OS and increased the size of my XP partition by about 10 GB and the size of my work folder partition by about 10 GB during the Norton clone. I then put the Samsung into the T61 booted, but received an error:

A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

I've never had this happen before, even when increasing XP partition sizes using Ghost. Any chance this SSD won't work on the T61? What did you use to clone your setup? I'm going to try Clonezilla next.

EDIT: I had Clonezilla clone the HDD with the exact same size of partitions and I was able to boot fine now. I guess I'll have to resize the C and D partitions with partition magic, which requires deleting the D drive, resizing, and putting the storage data back. I don't feel like messing around with Clonezilla's partition resizing options.

vetz wrote on 2020-04-28, 18:45:

Unfortunately my mainboard was hit by the nvidia GPU death which is very common place so had to swap it out with a T61 I got locally. It now works with the NV140 (same you have), but without the graphical powers of the Quadro FX. I don't use it much these days after I got a laptop from my work, but untill 2018 it was my daily driver as laptop. I've now donated it to my dad who uses it for solitaire and light Word/Excel tasks. After swapping to the NV140 I do notice GPU acceleration on websites and on Youtube have become worse, so if I find a working T61p I'll swap back.

I had an R61 with the NVS140 and it was crap. At the time (Windows Vista) if you started dragging around a window it would first be extremely slow as the GPU had to get out of idle mode - I had to install a tool which prevented the GPU from downclocking. In any case, my NVS140 died the same way, those GPUs have the same issue. Putting the motherboard in the oven fixed it for a couple of days, then it broke again. My next attempt the oven was apparently too hot as SMD components started falling off the board. I got a T61 with Intel graphics and swapped over the R61's higher res screen and bluetooth adapter.

feipoa wrote on 2020-04-29, 08:46:

What did you use to clone your setup?

I used the latest Acronis Bootable ISO

Oetker wrote on 2020-04-29, 11:33:

vetz wrote on 2020-04-28, 18:45:

Unfortunately my mainboard was hit by the nvidia GPU death which is very common place so had to swap it out with a T61 I got locally. It now works with the NV140 (same you have), but without the graphical powers of the Quadro FX. I don't use it much these days after I got a laptop from my work, but untill 2018 it was my daily driver as laptop. I've now donated it to my dad who uses it for solitaire and light Word/Excel tasks. After swapping to the NV140 I do notice GPU acceleration on websites and on Youtube have become worse, so if I find a working T61p I'll swap back.

I had an R61 with the NVS140 and it was crap. At the time (Windows Vista) if you started dragging around a window it would first be extremely slow as the GPU had to get out of idle mode - I had to install a tool which prevented the GPU from downclocking. In any case, my NVS140 died the same way, those GPUs have the same issue. Putting the motherboard in the oven fixed it for a couple of days, then it broke again. My next attempt the oven was apparently too hot as SMD components started falling off the board. I got a T61 with Intel graphics and swapped over the R61's higher res screen and bluetooth adapter.

I guess I've been lucky so far then! My first board had an NVIDIA chip with a 2007 production date and this replacement has a Feb/2008 date - I think (?) the issue was resolved in boards that came out in late August of 2008, so both of my boards would theoretically be impacted. Graphics performance on both of mine have been just fine for what I use it for - web / forum browsing and YouTube. No, 60 FPS 1080P videos don't work but for everything else performance seems fine, even with the down-volted GPU on the newer/replacement board. I'm hoping that with the undervolting and some MX-4 on there that will keep this going for a bit. Time will tell!

Were you able to determine if your T61 is running at SATA II speeds after upgrading to the Middleton BIOS? I did not see any indicator in Everest or Astra32 that the system Intel ICH8M-E/M SATA controller is running in SATA II mode. Astra32 indicated that it was running in UDMA mode 6, which is 133 MB/s. Some benchmarks on my T61 follow.

Diskspeed32
max speed of 1.44 Gbit/s
ave speed of 1.20 Gbit/s

HDTune
max speed of 1.32 Gbit/s
min speed of 1.20 Gbit/s

Roadkil Disk Speed (select values)
1KB block linear read - 0.1 Gbit/s
16KB block lienar read - 0.82 Gbit/s
1024KB block linear read - 2.03 Gbit/s

1024K was the largest block, but looking at the results, it looks like it was starting to level off anyway.

Atto Disk Benchmark
showed a similar picture to Roadkil, but went up to 8192 KB block sizes.
8192KB block read - 2.27 Gbit/s
8192KB block write - 2.06 Gbit/s

I ran a quick comparison using these same 4 benchmarks on my primary desktop, which is an Opteron 185 system running at 2.6 GHz. The HDD in that system is a hybrid drive with 8 GB SSD and the remainder of the 2 TB is magnetic disc. ST2000DX 002-2D0164 is the model number. I ran this drive on all three SATA revisions. The SATA I port is an ALi M5229, SATA II port is a JMicron 20360, and SATA III port is a Marvel 88SE9215.

Diskspeed32
SATA 1: max speed of 0.89 Gbit/s
SATA 2: max speed of 1.13 Gbit/s
SATA 3: max speed of 1.32 Gbit/s

HDTune
SATA 1: max speed of 0.89 Gbit/s
SATA 2: max speed of 1.14 Gbit/s
SATA 3: max speed of 1.28 Gbit/s

Roadkil Disk Speed (select values)
SATA 1: 1KB block linear read - 0.12 Gbit/s
SATA 2: 1KB block linear read - 0.21 Gbit/s
SATA 3: 1KB block linear read - 0.12 Gbit/s

SATA 1: 16KB block linear read - 0.27 Gbit/s
SATA 2: 16KB block linear read - 0.89 Gbit/s
SATA 3: 16KB block linear read - 0.83 Gbit/s

SATA 1: 1024KB block linear read - 1.0 Gbit/s
SATA 2: 1024KB block linear read - 1.05 Gbit/s
SATA 3: 1024KB block linear read - 1.54 Gbit/s

Atto Disk Benchmark
SATA 1: 8192KB block read - 0.70 Gbit/s
SATA 2: 8192KB block read - 0.60 Gbit/s
SATA 3: 8192KB block read - 0.69 Gbit/s

SATA 1: 8192KB block write - 0.58 Gbit/s
SATA 2: 8192KB block write - 0.80 Gbit/s
SATA 3: 8192KB block write - 1.05 Gbit/s

For block sizes under 16K, it looks like the hybrid drive is comparable to the Samsung SSD, but above 16K reads, the SSD pulls ahead by more than double in the 1MB - 8MB range. Also curious is why the hybrid drive is faster at writes while the SSD is faster at reads.

In none of the benchmarks did the SSD get to the 3.0 Gbit/s that SATA II is theoretically capable of. I read online that these solid state drives should be able to reach or almost reach the interface limits, thus I'm left wondering - is the host controller really operating in SATA II mode on the T61? If so, what is holding it back? Artex, I'd be very interested to see your benchmark results, especially if you took any before the Middleton BIOS upgrade as well as after.

According to Wiki there is this 8b/10b encoding overhead which limits the maximum bandwidth to 2.4 Gbit/s (300 Mbyte/s) on SATA II. So I guess that 2.27 Gbit/s reported in one of the benchmarks is getting pretty close.

I later edited this post to add the Opteron 185 scores with SATA I, II, and III controllers. The results didn't exactly blow me away. I guess the PCIe bus is the limiting factor, or perhaps the USB 3.0 card with gigabit ethernet is slowing it down some. Based on the results for the Opteron 185, it must be using PCIe rev 1.x, and a single lane only (x1) which has a max bandwidth of 2.0 Gbit/s. But The Lenovo T61 was released during a time I would have thought it used PCIe rev 2.x, so even a single lane should do 4 Gbit/s. Maybe the T61 is PCIe 1.x only?

CrystalDiskInfo reports SATA 300 is currently active. I didn't run any benchmarks though.

Same for me. I'll have to connect the HDD up to a SATA I controller to see what Crystal reports. Why does Crystal also show SATA/600?

Good news. CrystalDiskInfo 8.4.2 shows this when my SATA III drive is connected to a SATA I controller:

1SATA/150 | SATA/600

Seems to me that the first value recorded above indicates the interface speed currently in use, while the second value indicates the latest SATA revision capable by the hard drive.

feipoa wrote on 2020-05-02, 02:06:

Good news. CrystalDiskInfo 8.4.2 shows this when my SATA III drive is connected to a SATA I controller: […]
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Good news. CrystalDiskInfo 8.4.2 shows this when my SATA III drive is connected to a SATA I controller:

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1SATA/150 | SATA/600

Seems to me that the first value recorded above indicates the interface speed currently in use, while the second value indicates the latest SATA revision capable by the hard drive.

Makes sense - current vs support speeds.

I wasn't as lucky with this upgrade. The only Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 2.8GHz Dual-Core CPU I could get shipped to Canada was a used one with SLAZ3. The other sellers wouldn't ship to Canada. It arrived recently. I installed it and powered up, but the system won't boot. I see it tries to turn on, then resets in an infinite loop of resets. Nothing every shows up on the screen. I already had the Middleton BIOS installed. Perhaps not all revisions of the T61 mainboard support the X9000, or perhaps my CPU is DOA? Or perhaps there is some difference between SLAZ3 and SLAQJ?

Artex, can you confirm that these are the BIOS and system controller versions on your T61?

feipoa wrote on 2020-06-18, 08:39:

I wasn't as lucky with this upgrade. The only Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 2.8GHz Dual-Core CPU I could get shipped to Canada was a used one with SLAZ3. The other sellers wouldn't ship to Canada. It arrived recently. I installed it and powered up, but the system won't boot. I see it tries to turn on, then resets in an infinite loop of resets. Nothing every shows up on the screen. I already had the Middleton BIOS installed. Perhaps not all revisions of the T61 mainboard support the X9000, or perhaps my CPU is DOA? Or perhaps there is some difference between SLAZ3 and SLAQJ?

Artex, can you confirm that these are the BIOS and system controller versions on your T61?
Lenovo_T61_BIOS_Screen.jpg

I will check and get back to you this evening. What is the FRU # of your mainboard?

I didn't jot that down. Is it on some sticker on the board, if so where bouts? I'll have to open it up again. Does this only work for particular FRU's?

feipoa wrote on 2020-06-18, 08:39:

I wasn't as lucky with this upgrade. The only Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 2.8GHz Dual-Core CPU I could get shipped to Canada was a used one with SLAZ3. The other sellers wouldn't ship to Canada. It arrived recently. I installed it and powered up, but the system won't boot. I see it tries to turn on, then resets in an infinite loop of resets. Nothing every shows up on the screen. I already had the Middleton BIOS installed. Perhaps not all revisions of the T61 mainboard support the X9000, or perhaps my CPU is DOA? Or perhaps there is some difference between SLAZ3 and SLAQJ?

Most likely, your CPU is a fake. It's an issue with these.
https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=127430
https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=130581

Could very well be fake. Does it look like there is a sticker over the original black label identifier?

feipoa wrote on 2020-06-18, 19:08:

I didn't jot that down. Is it on some sticker on the board, if so where bouts? I'll have to open it up again. Does this only work for particular FRU's?

Most likely a fake chip if you've already installed the Middleton BIOS. The FRU is on a sticker where the memory is installed.

Probably, especially if you using the same system controller version and BIOS revision; are you?

feipoa wrote on 2020-06-18, 08:39:

I wasn't as lucky with this upgrade. The only Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 2.8GHz Dual-Core CPU I could get shipped to Canada was a used one with SLAZ3. The other sellers wouldn't ship to Canada. It arrived recently. I installed it and powered up, but the system won't boot. I see it tries to turn on, then resets in an infinite loop of resets. Nothing every shows up on the screen. I already had the Middleton BIOS installed. Perhaps not all revisions of the T61 mainboard support the X9000, or perhaps my CPU is DOA? Or perhaps there is some difference between SLAZ3 and SLAQJ?

Artex, can you confirm that these are the BIOS and system controller versions on your T61?
Lenovo_T61_BIOS_Screen.jpg

Hey, i did this same kind of upgrade a while ago on some T61 and R61. I found out the hard way that several of the Core 2 Extreme draw too much power for the laptop to handle. The only way to run them is to disconnect the battery entirely and run it off a higher wattage charger, like from a W- series or something. It's quite unlikely the CPU is DOA. If you can get access to a higher wattage charger, you should be able to get everything running.

I don't know about the prevalence of fakes on the market, but I guess I would consider it to be a possibility.

feipoa wrote on 2020-06-19, 04:13:

Probably, especially if you using the same system controller version and BIOS revision; are you?

Sorry for the late reply! I had to swap out the Ethernet jack on my T430 tonight. Here is what I have:

I don't understand why our BIOS versions numbers are different. Mine has a later release date. Are you not using the Middleton BIOS? Am I not using the Middleton BIOS?

What does the readme look like for yous BIOS package? This is mine.

1This is Lenovo ThinkPad BIOS.
2
3Changelog:
4
5- Disabled whitelist check.
6- Enabled SATA II full speed.
7- Added SLIC 2.1 table.
8- Removed "Thermal sensing error" boot message (Penryn CPUs).
9- Added dual-IDA support.
10
11
12Version 2.29-1.08
13BIOS: 2.29 / ECP: 1.08
14
15
16Supported ThinkPad systems:
17
18- R61 (14.1 inch widescreen models with IEEE 1394)
19- R61i (14.1 inch widescreen models with IEEE 1394)
20- T61/T61p

I used an an undervolted version of the BIOS:

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T61-and … 61/td-p/1721929

or

https://thinkpad-forum.de/threads/172581-Anle … -Laufen-bringen