I'm trying to upgrade the bios on an i 1400 Series ThinkPad. It produced the floppy to do this okay, but when I reboot and let the flash program start its' thing, it comes back with a VPD error and doesn't even begin.
 
The error does not say what piece of hardware it's having a problem with.  The battery pack is no good, but all other peripherals are okay.  Any ideas?

download another copy of the bios and put it on a different floppy, i hope you have a workable drive though
 
..this is very useful and helpful place for information...

This was good advice.  I noodled around the IBM Downloads site a little deeper, and found a VPD Checksum Error Patch. After I installed this, the Bios upgrade went fine.
Thank you.