Thinkpads Forum

Hi! New guy over here. My A21m (5 years old now!) wouldn't start up a couple days ago. I brought it to Best Buy for a diagnostic, and they said I would need to find 'restore disks' for it. I don't ever remember getting them when I got the laptop through school (I could be wrong), but they said I could find it online, possibly with IBM. I tried looking, but is there anyone out there who could direct me with a link, or does anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks in advance!!

hi.
an even newer guy here.
i have been looking for the "recovery cd" set with win98 for my a21m
and have come close on ebay (almost got a win2k set, but ebay
pulled it).
my best advice for getting it on ebay is to execute a "buy it now" and
get the goodies on their way to you, because many folks don't read
ebay's rules about requiring hardware to go with the oem software
and their auctions get pulled..
with luck, the seller will toss in a disk cover or something else cheap
that applies to the laptop.

btw, you will have no luck in getting it from ibm (or lenovo(?) to whom
all the tpad biz has xferred) if the operating system flavour is no
longer supported/licensed.
i am after win98 so i am s.o.l. -- the ibm folks won't even tell me the
original part number or whether the t21m cd set i somehow have
will come close to working.
if you have win2k you might still be ok, but expect to spend a lot of
time working your way thru the ibm webpages.
the ebay route won't be much faster, as they don't appear all that
often.

best of luck!

Just post a WTB thread in the FS/WTB Conference (or hopefully a mod could move this thread for you to avoid double posting).

There are many nice forum members that might have the disks that you are looking for. They might be able to send you copies for the cost of shipping, or maybe just a little more.

Topic moved; have fun

I have a win98 and win2000 restore disks for an a21m.

I have a bootable A21m Win98 recovery disk as well. Don't need it any more.

i would happily pay shipping and a bit more, _especially_ if it is specific
to the 2628-FSU model (e.g. the 2628-FXx is a very similar a21m but
it has a different ether, so the =rebrick= disk set is different.)

unfortunately, i have been unable to get anybody to tell me the ibm part
number for the cds they originally shipped.

i can be reached at bear@meddle.org if anybody wants to get into the
details of a transaction.

thanks folks!