I have an old IBM Thinkpad that was given to me to fix. There is no OS on the hard disk, no floppy drive, and I can't find an option anywere in the BIOS to boot from a CD. The guy says he never had a floppy drive for the laptop. A few questions:
1) If I buy an external floppy drive, can I use it to boot the computer? Do I need to get a special type of drive?
2) Am I missing a setting, and I can boot from a CD-ROM? The recovery disk that came with the laptop is bootable-it seems like they would at least make the BIOS capable of booting a CD if they're giving you a recovery CD.
I have no idea what to do with this thing-I've installed Windows more times than I can count, but I've never had to do it without a bootable floppy or CD. This thing is about as useful as a brick right now! I have been to IBM's website, but I can't find much on this particular problem. System specs (as well as I can acertain) below.
-Aarmenaa
IBM Thinkpad 765L Type 9547-U9J
Pentium 166 MMX (P55C)
32 MB RAM
8X CD-ROM (Integrated, not in a removable bay)
3 GB EIDE hard disk