Thinkpads Forum

This might be a dumb question, but since I don't see an FDD listed as an available device in Ultrabay Slim form (in thinkwiki), how does one boot a T4x or T6x with a diskette?

I want to be able to clone my wife's 100GB onto a Hitachi 500 GB, but i always end up screwing up the final step by somehow having the machine reboot with the new drive in the Ultrabay and winblows overwrites the MBR this hosing the drive as a boot device until the MBR is re-written

Any ideas? Thanks

USB Floppy works for me.

T40 is compatible with Dock II. Dock II can hold a floppy drive.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_ ... rabay_2000

virge wrote:USB Floppy works for me.

Thanks, i didn't know you could boot from a USB floppy. The local goodwill store had about 50 of these for like $3 or $4 so i guess i'll get 1 or 2.

Bought 2 ( Teacs @ $4 ea), cleaned the outsides, and they booth boot my T30 just fine. When i get home, I'll try them on my Wife's T61.

I don't know for sure about T60.

But on my T4x Port Replicator, there is a connector for a floppy drive.

It's a crazy system. You need a compatible drive, the one I have once belonged inside a T22.
Then, there is also a proprietary cord from IBM, that has an Ultrabay connector on one side and LPT on the other.. It was used to make T22 work with both floppy and CD simultaneously when the floppy is outside, and CD is inside the ultrabay... The LPT part is in fact a small separate adapter and can be separated from the main cable, then the main cable can fit the Dock.

Yamato engineering at it's best.

P.S. You WILL need the floppy if you ever need to change the motherboard serial number. I had to, after buying a second-hand TP with a replaced motherboard. ThinkVantage System Update didn't work, so I did that procedure with the Service Diskette. Other than that, it's mostly useless

Both USB floppy drives and USB CD/DVD drives work as boot-drives with anything from T4x/R5x upwards.

If you ever grow tired of 1.44MB diskette...

I purchased 2GB Sandisk SDCZ36-002G and made it DOS bootable using...
http://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk-St ... 74082.html

I don't see any reason why the USB Flashdrive couldn't be made to run Linux.

The only problem that I've encountered so far is that I am not able to find a DOS Mouse driver that works with the new Intel iCore based machines. The resulting problem is that all programs after Mouse.com will lock up and hang the machine.

The old vaudeville line...
Patient: Doc, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor: Stop doing it.

I removed Mouse.com from autoexec.bat and no longer have mouse support for DOS programs.

The 2 Teac USB FDDs boot both my T30s and T22s

The fact that they would boot the T22s is interesting (and helpful since one of my T22s just doesn't like the internal FDD!!!)

I found an office depot or staples USB FDD in my wife's desk - no idea where she got it (I think it has a samsung FDD in it), but i managed to install it on her T61 and it booted a Win98SE startup disk just fine.

So i can pretty much boot any of my ThinkPads with a USB floppy.

I also have 3 T2x / T30 internal FDDs and 2 of the IBM special cables to connect to the parallel port (an 1 or 2 of the little adapters to connect to the dock port (I have 2 of the ThinkPad T2x / T30 docks), so I now can boot my T2xs and T30s in a variety of ways.

And thanks to RBS, i should be able to use the USB FDDs in W98 after boot with the W98 USB FDD drivers.