T42 wont boot to CD-Rom

[liliggyracin]

Have a t-42 and just recieved a new Hard-drive from IBM to replace one that went to crap on me. I put in the cd to reload windows and it wont boot to the cd-rom. I went into Bios and set it to boot to Cd-Rom first but it by-passes it. Any ideas on what I could do next?

Thanks

Iggy

EDIT Getting an error during boot that says PXE-E61 : Media test failure, check cable. Any ideas? Possible that my motherboard went to crap and the errors I was seeing on the HD were caused by the motherboard?

EDIT2 I am currently loading the Reload disk onto a 4 gig USB drive and going to try that as well. But any other help would be greatly appreciated.

[bfgun]

try the same cd on another pc and see if it loads to the cd or not?

[Chris001]

EDIT Getting an error during boot that says PXE-E61 : Media test failure, check cable. Any ideas? Possible that my motherboard went to crap and the errors I was seeing on the HD were caused by the motherboard?

Make sure the new HDD is seated properly. The PXE-E61 error usuall means the laptop cannot find the HDD.

[GomJabbar]

The PXE-E61 error means that your computer is trying to boot up off of a network drive which is non-existant in your setup, or your network card adapter's EEPROM is corrupted.

See following thread for PXE error - start reading from steveg47 on.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 280#217280

As far as your CD not booting up, try removing the optical drive from the laptop, then reinserting it. Next try getting a CD drive cleaning kit and give that a shot. Also make sure your CD is clean and not scratched. After cleaning, see if it will read the CD then. It could be your CD reader is picky about the CD's it will read. Sometimes if several attempts are made, one of the attempts will work.

I don't know if a Supervisor password set in the BIOS could prevent booting from a CD or not.

[liliggyracin]

Well found the problem. Upon removing and reseating the CD-Rom a second time I heard somethign funny. I removed the CD-rom and a piece of it fell out onto the desk. I went to parts rack and grabbed another and put it in. Loaded fine. Thanks to everyone that assisted with information.