Thinkpads Forum

Okay, here goes another thinkpad 240 question. I have a system with Windows xp professional on it and I was wonder if I could use it to install windows 2000 on my thinkpad 240 with 192 meg of memory 300mhz celeron processor using a crossover cable, if so how do I go about this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

More information is needed about your "other system." I have installed Win98 with a crossover cable, enabling DOS network card drivers, but that's been some time ago. Things change if you want to install Win2000, I'm sure, and especially if you want to install as NTFS. Not sure what to tell you. Is there no CD rom on your 240? If there was, the easiest is of course to do a clean install from a bootable CD. Another option is to copy the disc onto an external HDD (making it bootable) and boot from that, but not sure if the 240 BIOS allows this. Hopefully others here are more knowlegeable.

No, there is no cd-rom tried copying the entire windows 2000 disk to the hard drive but I get the a message that cannot run setup from dos. I previously formatted this hard drive and made sure the partition was active. My other system is a dell with xp pro a 2.2 gig processor and 768 meg of memory and 200 gig hard drive. Whether the install is fat32 or ntfs doesn't matter at this point. I'm just trying to figure out how to install 2000 without a cd-rom I've done this before but cannot remember how I did it because it's been so long.

Have you tried making the bootable floppies from within the Win2000 CD (now on your HDD)? Though, I'm not sure if that will work either...I think it may utimately ask you to put in your CD after all the discs load.

Just thought of another way....but not sure if this would work either....
Anyway, enable network support in DOS to a computer with a CDrom and share that drive. Maybe the CD-less computer will recognize the CD on the other computer as its own. However, I know that there would have to be some fanagling to get this to work. You might search (google) for "Installing Windows over a network." IBM also has this, possibly useful information for a few of it's computers that may also be helpful for you:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.ws ... 2865&aid=1

Good luck!

The program, setup.exe is a windows program, the program
i386\winnt.exe is a dos setup program for windows 2000

So it would make sense to boot with a Win98 or similar floppy disc, use DOS commands (MKDIR for instance) to make a directory on the "C" drive, copy the contents of the i386 folder into that folder, then do a cd\ C:/i386 command and then just type winnt.exe for the setup to begin.

I hope the above is right. If not, someone correct me.