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I bought a refurbished Thinkpad T410 which has the incorrect Product, Verion and Serial number entered in the DMI data.

I installed a new OEM disk of Windows 7 Pro. While installing the Thinkpad drivers I realised that the machine was being detected as a Thinkpad T400 not T410 and discovered that the DMI data is reporting a Product, Version and Serial Number that do not match those on the sticker on the machine and which correspond to a different model.

This leaves three questions.

If I leave it as it is, am I right in assuming that this will not cause any problems as long as I manually verify and correct the results of any tools that identify my hardware (eg the Crucial system scanner).

If I do correct the DMI data, am I going to create problems with Windows being authenticated against a motherboard with a BIOS originally reporting different data?

Third, what is a reliable tool that works with Windows 7 64 bit to do this? (I'm assuming that the process will probably involve downloading then editing a BIOS image then reflashing the motherboard with the new BIOS but maybe there's an other way.)

user3946
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  • Thank you - if you put that as a reply rather than a comment then I'd be able to accept it :) There were no recovery disks supplied but I've contacted Lenovo support and paid an admin fee for a new set - so I guess I'll see whether they work. – user3946 Aug 26 '12 at 17:31
  • Let me know if recovery discs don't work, there may be a way to make them work if they don't, what OS was sold with that laptop? Who refurbished the laptop? – Moab Aug 26 '12 at 20:17
  • Thanks, that's kind of you but I'm sure I can get it to work. Sold without OS or recovery disks and no recovery partition on HDD. I ordered the recovery disks for whoever I pass the laptop onto when I next upgrade. I was just curious about how one might edit the DMI - in all honesty, I suspect the data was entered by mistake and not deliberately. – user3946 Aug 27 '12 at 11:12

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Only Lenovo can correct the DMI data, there may be some hacks floating around on the internet but nothing official. The change to the dmi data may be part of the refurbishing process, as long as the recovery discs supplied with the notebook work, then there is no reason to change it.

Moab
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