Thinkpads Forum

I found a IBM Thinkpad 390 at a dump i looked around and i found the battery for it, and i also found the cd drive for it, and i also found a working 80GB hardrive and hd adapter that fits the laptop for it. Good deal right? haha well i got it home and luckily i had a charger that fit it! AND THE LAPTOP WORKS! AND THE BATTERY HOLDS A GOOD CHARGE! well i found out the little watch battery inside the laptop is dead because the time goes back to 12:00 everytime i reboot. (BIOS battery i think) im buying a new one for it but my main question is. The hardrive thats in it is a 80GB and it has win 98 on it i tried installing win xp but the cd drive will not read the disk properly (might be the disk or the drive idk). But what im trying to get to is can i put the HD in my TOSHIBA laptop and download win xp to it then put it in the IBM and it will work? Any other ideas are welcome.
Thanks,
Christopher

IBM Thinkpad 390 wrote:I found a IBM Thinkpad 390 at a dump i looked around and i found the battery for it, and i also found the cd drive for it, and i also found a working 80GB hardrive and hd adapter that fits the laptop for it. Good deal right? haha well i got it home and luckily i had a charger that fit it! AND THE LAPTOP WORKS! AND THE BATTERY HOLDS A GOOD CHARGE! well i found out the little watch battery inside the laptop is dead because the time goes back to 12:00 everytime i reboot. (BIOS battery i think) im buying a new one for it but my main question is. The hardrive thats in it is a 80GB and it has win 98 on it i tried installing win xp but the cd drive will not read the disk properly (might be the disk or the drive idk). But what im trying to get to is can i put the HD in my TOSHIBA laptop and download win xp to it then put it in the IBM and it will work? Any other ideas are welcome.
Thanks,
Christopher

Does the 390 have a USB port? It would have to, right? They've been standard since the 600 series at least. Have you thought of trying an ISO image of XP loaded from a flash drive? I have no idea if that would work or not; but it seems I remember one of my coworkers talking about trying it. I don't know how it came out.

yes it has 1 usb port and it works but how would i get win xp onto the flash drive?

IBM Thinkpad 390 wrote:yes it has 1 usb port and it works but how would i get win xp onto the flash drive?

You'll probably need at least a 4 GB flash drive. All you have to do is to make an ISO image of Windows and copy the ISO to the flash drive. ISOs look, to your computer, exactly like the image of, say, a CD-ROM (or, more specifically, the image on the CD-ROM). I believe this file type is used by CD/DVD burning software which creates an ISO of the files you're burning to the CD.

This link might help. I'm no expert on this, and someone else here might be of more assistance.

http://www.techtipsgeek.com/xp-sp3-boot ... -bcd/2353/

Installing Windows on a hard disk in one laptop, and then moving that HD into another laptop is not going to work unless both laptops have an identical hardware platform.

You should be able to do it in a fairly roundabout way. A better place to ask this would be on the MSFN XP subforum.

My first attempt would to be to run the XP text-mode install up to the reboot, then put it into the 390.

Here is a handy little tool for creating DVDs or bootable USB flash drives from an ISO file. I've used it for Windows 7, but don't know how backward compatible it will be to older OS'es.

http://download.cnet.com/Windows-7-USB- ... 72600.html

Probably want this:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/120444- ... -with-gui/

Or this:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/111406- ... -from-usb/

Or anything relevant from here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/forum/157-ins ... -from-usb/

The easiest way to do this starts with a floppy drive - boot a windows 98 recovery diskette, and run the command "format c: /q" (quick format), then type the command "sys c:" (installs the base system). Then take the drive out, use a usb adapter to connect it to another system, and copy the I386 folder off the xp cd to the hard drive. After you have done that, put the drive back into the system, boot it up, and type the commands "cd i386", then "smartdrv" (improves drive performance an incredible amount), then just run "winnt.exe" and it should launch the xp installer.

Also see:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307848
Good luck.

RealBlackStuff wrote:Installing Windows on a hard disk in one laptop, and then moving that HD into another laptop is not going to work unless both laptops have an identical hardware platform.

This is not totally true, I have had the same XP install on my machine through 3 different motherboard/video card combos. Each time there was a LOT of new hardware detected but it booted right up.

The last motherboard went from an nVidia chipset to an AMD one as well. I do however get rid of the unused hardware in the registry after the upgrade. And as far as activation, I use alternate methods from stock, so a non issue.

Past activation, windows is pretty good at booting on hardware that it was not installed on in most cases. De-installing chipset, video, sound, lan beforhand wouldn't hurt either. If the hardware is similar... intel chipset to intel chipset, nVidia graphics to nVidia graphics... I wouldn't see there being an issue at all.

But for a NEW install, craigmontHunter is spot on with the easiest way todo it