OLD Ibm thinkpad 385xd H E L P !!!

themightymachine · March 12th, 2004, 12:57 AM

Hey guys!

I am desparate for some help on a very old IBM Thinkpad 385XD.
I only use it for one purpose, so you can stop laughing now!

Okay, I formatted the hard drive. I was planning on using a fresh windows 98 diskette to start up fresh again. The problem is...the stupid floppy drive does not work. So even if I set the boot priority to the floppy first (by using the F1 at startup) it just tells me INVALID SYSTEM DISK....
I actually bought an external floppy with a USB connector, but obviously I cant' set the thinkpad to boot from it first, without drivers at least.

What can I do??

I even set the CDROM drive to boot first, but nothing happens. I still get that INVALID SYSTEM DISK coming up.

I would greatly appreciate any, any feedback at all. Even if it sucks to be me!

Thanks!
TMM

Mickwish · March 12th, 2004, 01:03 AM

Welcome to TechIMO. This thread should be moved to a tech forum.

Hoepfully someone will move it soon.

Is the CD-ROm you are trying to boot from an actual M$ hologramed disk, or a copy? Some old CD-ROMS's won't read CD-R's, so if you have the orginal disk it might boot from it.

Cheers
Mick

**RobRich** · March 12th, 2004, 01:06 AM

Thread moved....

**RobRich** · March 12th, 2004, 01:11 AM

Are you using a valid boot disk that is free from defects?

Dowload a Win98 boot disk from here....

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Create the bootdisk according to instructions, then try booting to DOS from drive A.

Robert Richmond

pelicanman · March 12th, 2004, 09:57 AM

If the floppy disk won't boot (for whatever reason) you will need to direct install the OS. The BIOS is probably too old to be able to boot directly off a CD. If you think the external floppy drive itself is defective you can probably get a replacement off ebay for $ 15-25 or so. Make sure under BIOS boot options that the BIOS is set to look for the floppy before it looks for the CD or hard drive.

TO do a direct install

1:Remove the notebook hard disk

2:Attach it to a 3.5 to 2.5 IDE adapter (around $ 10-15 online or parts stores, and lets you plug a 2.5 hard drive into a standard 3.5 IDE connection) and plug it in to a desktop.

3: Format the notebook hard disk (via the desktop connection) disk and make it bootable.

4: Make a directory on the notebook hard disk "c:\win95" and copy the entire Win 95 CD into that directory

5: Re-attach the hard disk to the notebook and do the install directly from the c:\win95 directory.