Thinkpads Forum

just inherited a 570e with win98 on it, and would like to upgrade the os to linux. i don't have an ultrabase, or floppy or cdrom attached. to install another os, i need to be able to boot from SOMEWHERE other than the primary hd partition. i have a pcmcia flash card, and access to a pcmcia cd-rom and ethernet card. i can't seem to boot off of the pcmcia slots, and i can't repartition the harddrive/install a bootloader without a floppy drive apparently. my bios has options for "legacy floppy", "atapi cdrom", "network", and "harddrive". any suggestions? thanks,
-mike

IBM has portable drive bays available the plug into the pc card slot. I don't know if this will help but you can find them on ebay. After you use it on this machine you may be able to keep it handy for future jobs so you can get your money's worth. You may even have a drive from another thinkpad that will fit into the bay so all you may have to buy is the portable bay and IDE card. Good luck and I hope your having a very good day.

Thomas Starich

again, i can't get it to boot from a pccard, so that isn't really an option.

however, new idea. i used parition magic extremely unsuccessfully, to the point where it won't boot. of course, i still can't boot from a boot disk. i bought a floppy drive on ebay, but in the mean time i've got 2 options, both of which should work.

the hard drive on this is extremely easy to swap out, so here is my plan:
1. my girlfriend has a newer thinkpad, again with a swappable hard drive as well as built in cd-rom and floppy. i'm going to swap hard drives, and work from her computer. if that doesn' work (it should, or else i think i'm screwed), or if i didn't have this cop-out solution,
2. i was going to buy an adapter ($15-20 online) so that i could just plug the drive into my desktop as a slave hard drive. i may get the adapter anyway, as i'll be able to use my desktop to transfer files to the harddrive. or spend the money on a network card, plug it into the home network, and transfer files that way (probably a better idea).

i had the same problem, basically. So i bought one of those adapters from my local shop, popped the drive into my PC, and installed DOS (nothing else would boot up). Anyway, point being: Peanut Linux (and likely many other distros) can install from DOS without needing to boot off anything, i think. You just have to copy a few files, and run the .bat file. This is what the documentation said, anyway--i haven't tried it yet. Or copy files from girlfriend's sys on HDD and install on your laptop.

But probably someone more in-the-know would have easier solutions. Still, it's do-able. i guess that's all i'm saying.


b.

The 570 series should have an external floppy connector. It should fit either the external 760 housing or the external 600 floppy housing.

Depending on the age of your girlfriend's Thinkpad, you may be able to use her floppy with your 570.

If you are going out to buy something, keep looking on Ebay. Floppies for all the old Thinkpads come up from time to time.

Hope this helps.