Thinkpads Forum

I Want To Know how 2 build bootable floppy 2 support a USB CD ROM

I looking for suggestions on how (when needed) to rebuild my 240 (2609-21U) laptop if the HD goes south.

What I have besides the 240 (2609-21U) is the external floppy (fru 05K8990) with the floppy cable (fru 12J0432). I also have a portable drive bay 2000 (fru 19K4499) with the USB cable (fru 19K4493).

Currently, I have XP Pro on this 240 and all works fine. I can read from the floppy and the CD Rom.

However, if I ever need to rebuild the HD, I know the BIOS won’t be able to see the USB CD Rom to restore the OS from the CD.

If I had the PCMCIA interface card and cable for the portable drive bay, IBM has a bootable floppy that will work. But I can’t find anything on the IBM site, that works, to boot from floppy to use the Portable Drive Bay 200 via USB cable.

IBM has some bootable floppies that are suppose to see USB CD ROMs but when I build them and test them out, they don’t work. I get:
Device Name :USBCD001
[Invalid Parameter]
Device did not stay resident.

I’m looking for suggestions or pointers as to where I should of looked or what I may have missed.

This suggestion might not apply in your case, but I thought I'd throw it out here if it does...

If I was in the position of trying to retain a copy of a hard drive for a system which has limited connectivity to either floppy, hard drive or optical drive (internally or externally), then I would simply take the hard drive out and put it into another laptop which does have those resources available and clone the drive there. For example, an A31 system could be used as follows:

- backup hard drive installed in the A31 hard drive bay
- 240 hard drive installed in an Ultrabay 2000 HD adapter
- floppy or optical drive in the second Ultrabay as the bootable drive for your backup/clone software

My setup uses a T23, an 02K8668 port replicator, a 600-series external floppy (05K6187) and an Ultrabay HD adapter (08K6067) to do the same thing. Using a Ghost boot floppy in the external floppy drive I can clone the hard drives. This method of using another laptop might not work for installing an OS from scratch since the hardware in the "host" laptop will be seen by the install process and used to configure the software. There may be a way to get around this but I've never had a need to try it. On the other hand, if your system is already working as you like it, cloning your existing setup means that you don't need to re-install the OS.

I originally built this system using a USB to IDE adapter. I was able to format the drive and load the I386 folder. I then installed it into the 240, booted W98SE from floppy, switched to C: and CDed into the I386 folder where I executed the winnt program. From there everything worked.

However, my son, in a far and distant town, wants the TP. If I don't set it up to restore from the CD ROM, it will end up being a pain to me.

I found the portable drive bay in a garage sale. I had a CD ROM from an old TP that I put a DVD in which left this X20. The floppy came with the TP240.

I have made such a disk, but can't for the life of me remember how I did it. I needed it for a situation similar to yours -- reinstalling an OS on a machine that didn't support USB booting. This disk of mine worked fine for a no-name USB DVDRW drive I bought from eBay.

If you can point me to a tool that makes a disk image of a floppy, I'll create one and post it online

rek wrote:I have made such a disk, but can't for the life of me remember how I did it. I needed it for a situation similar to yours -- reinstalling an OS on a machine that didn't support USB booting. This disk of mine worked fine for a no-name USB DVDRW drive I bought from eBay.

If you can point me to a tool that makes a disk image of a floppy, I'll create one and post it online

If you use Linux you can use dd:

dd if=/dev/floppy of=./floppy.bin

Maybe this will work?

http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/usbdrv.html

I know you're asking about making your USB CR-ROM bootable... but my suggestion is to consider buying a parallel port CD-ROM drive. They're very cheap and virtually fool proof. They come with a DOS boot floppy that lets you see the CD drive even if your hard drive is bare. It's a very simple, very effective solution.