Latitude L400 PP01S BIOS update problem

Question

I have an old L400 from my sister, and it has a Pentium 3 400mhz processor and 6gb HDD, with no external floppy and cd-rom drive, running Windows 2000 with BIOS A02. I'd like to update the BIOS from A02 to A09 to accommodate larger HDD capacity, but the problem is, it can't boot from the removable drive, which is a super disc drive. and i also noticed that there's a Drive A: in My Computer, but there's no floppy drive. I tried to disable drive a: so it can boot to drive b:, which is the super disc, but still, no luck! Any suggestions on how to update the BIOS in this old thing? I'd also like to use an external HDD drive with enclosure, but when i plugged it in via USB, L400 can't recognize it. Thanks in advance for the replies.

Bay Wolf · Answer

My first question would be does the external HDD have its own power source?  If not, that may be the problem.  The USB port may not have enough power to drive the HDD.   The next question is what Service pack are you running for Win2000.  I would suggest updating to the latest one.

AlvinE · Answer

the external HDD has no own power source...i have to try that later it has Win200 Service Pack 2, i already tried to update it to SP 3 and SP 4, but all i got is an error in the update... and also, the 6gb hdd that comes with it has a 31mb partition and it says EISA Configuration. i suspect that maybe this is causing the update error thanks for the reply

jcn77056 · Answer

You may want to go out on E-Bay and buy an external CD or floppy. They're relatively inexpensive. The floppy or CD should use the same cable as the superdrive. That's always been the only way I've been able to update the system.

Wordex · Answer

It is a good idea to change the version of BIOS especially upward to A09 for L400 notebook. It is often that it takes the internal floppy drive unit to flash and overwrite the old BIOS A02. You can take out the PCMCIA unit away from the notebook's bay and install the floppy drive unit to the bay and it becomes the drive letter 'A'. You can link to usedlaptops.com for the module laptop floppy drive is only $10.00 plus shipping costs. The PCMAG.com have floppy drive plug-in modules that each costs between $35.00 to $69.99 plus tax and shipping fee. I suggest you to not to try external device to boot the BIOS into update.

jcn77056 · Answer

Unfortunately, the L400 has no bay. The floppy and CD-Rom connect to the machine via a short cable off the back of the machine. The system side of the cable is a high-density connector. The other side mates to any C-Series peripheral (floppy, CD-Rom, etc). There is an enclosure available which holds the peripheral but you don't really need it. If you have a superdrive, you should already have the cable.

Once you plug in a floppy drive, it looks to the system as an A: drive. This is what you use to update the BIOS.

If you can get a good battery, these laptops are great home machines for surfing the web. The CPU and memory is very limited so be careful how much you load on it.

Mine has 256mb of memory and I've added a 40Gb disk to it. Runs like a champ.

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