IBM Thinkpad 760el laptop help

WA5EBP · February 4th, 2004, 10:42 PM

Hello Anyone,
I have a IBM Thinkpad 760el laptop that has a 166MHz Pentiumll CPU, 32megs of memory and a 2.1 gig hard drive. I have just installed Windows98SE on it and all is well with the OS.
My question is can I swap the floppy drive out and install the 20X cd-rom drive or vise versa during a live windows session. Is there some software out there that will let me do this. The drives are installed in the internal bay on the left side of the laptop. When you lift the keyboard up to get to the bay the computer goes into a suspend mode.
Help!!!!
Thanks in advance.
WA5EBP@att.net

PresterJohn · February 4th, 2004, 10:50 PM

welcome to techimo.

no, you won't be able to swap them w/o rebooting.

WA5EBP · February 4th, 2004, 11:21 PM

Thanks Prester John,
I was afraid of that.
Later,
WA5EBP

Aaron_J · February 5th, 2004, 12:00 AM

I once had this exact model of laptop. Mine came with an external FDD that could be used with the internal cd drive.

If this is important you might want to check Ebay for one of these.

Here is a link to the floppy drives.

WA5EBP · February 5th, 2004, 07:59 AM

Thanks Aaron_J,
I had not thought of that. I will give ebay a try.
Later,
WA5EBP

jorgan · March 15th, 2004, 06:37 PM

Hi

i have just aquired the same model and got carried away with reformatting the HDD. how did you install win 98 when you have to boot from the floppy then change over to the CD, how do i get rid of the virtual drive? uch appreciated

jorgan

WA5EBP · March 15th, 2004, 10:28 PM

Hello Jorgan,
I used a bootable floppy with cd drivers on it. I installed the cd drivers on the hard drive then shut the laptop down and installed the internal cd-rom drive in place of the floppy drive. The cd I had with Windows98SE was a bootable cd. When the laptop booted up I just installed the OS.
Since you cannot swap drives during a windows session the way to go is to have the cd-rom drive installed internally and use an external floppy drive. They have them on ebay all the time. If you go that way be sure to get the drives for the 760el laptop.
I hope this info is of some help.
Later,
G. A. Williams
WA5EBP@att.net

jorgan · March 17th, 2004, 05:43 PM

Hi

thanks for the info, i have come right with loading win98 by loading dos and the dos driver for the CD ROM and then running with the CD-ROM in place. The snag i have hit now is when trying to load anything alse the CD ROM dirve hangs when the installation gets about 25%. Windows has the exact right model (TEAC CD-44E) model. i have tried re-installing and just about every thing i can think of but no luck. this happens with any installation software i try. i can read the disk and copy info off but thats it, any suggestions?
cheers
jorgan

pelicanman · March 17th, 2004, 11:52 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by jorgan
Hi

thanks for the info, i have come right with loading win98 by loading dos and the dos driver for the CD ROM and then running with the CD-ROM in place. The snag i have hit now is when trying to load anything alse the CD ROM dirve hangs when the installation gets about 25%. Windows has the exact right model (TEAC CD-44E) model. i have tried re-installing and just about every thing i can think of but no luck. this happens with any installation software i try. i can read the disk and copy info off but thats it, any suggestions?
cheers
jorgan

Boot with the floppy and make a "c:\win98" directory on the hard drive. Use dos "copy *.* " to copy all the files in the CD's win98 directory from the CD to the hard drive c:\win98 directory. Reboot with the floppy and install 98 from the hard drive directory.

jorgan · March 18th, 2004, 07:13 PM

Thanks for the feedback.

I think I’ve found the problem, the cd rom is sharing the HDD IRQ and is not set up as a secondary drive. When trying to install the think pad feature I’m asked for the win3.11/95 utility disk I only have the 95 cd which won’t help as the item only looks at the A drive. Any ideas where I can get a copy of the 3.11/95 utility disk?

jorgan