Recognising PCMCIA drive from boot - Thinkpad240x

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surana · #1 Post by **surana** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 6:49 am

Help!

I am trying to load windows XP onto my 240x.

The hard drive is unfomratted.

I load the bootdisk in the a drive so far so good but the PCMCIA card is not recognised.

Do i need some DOS drivers loaded onto the boot up disk...if yes where do I find these?

Cheers

Neil

#2 Post by **K. Eng** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 6:50 pm

Wrong forum! I'd move it but I think only Bill has mod privileges here. Belongs in Legacy Hardware, I believe

Nolonemo · #3 Post by **Nolonemo** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 7:26 pm

It's not clear from your post if you can boot to the C: prompt from the hard drive. If you can, go to step B.

If not, get a hold of a windows 98 boot floppy (go here to get one: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm ), boot from it and run format c: /sys
That will format your hard drive and make it bootable.

Step B. At this point, find the driver disk for your PCMICA drive, which should have a DOS driver install program on it (at least mine did) that will automatically edit your config.sys file, etc. to make the drive recognizable when you boot to DOS (the C: prompt). If the driver disk doesn't have the setup or install program on it, you'll have to copy the driver(s) to the C: drive and edit the config.sys file manually. Here's an article that explains that: http://www.everythingcomputers.com/wind ... t_disk.htm

Then try booting to the C: prompt, find the CD drive, navigate to the i386 directory on the WinXP disk, and execute the program winnt.exe that resides in there. That should copy the XP install files to your hard drive and start the install process. (To navigate in DOS, usually you'd just use the following commands to work your way through the maze...
C: [then hit ENTER to switch drives, e.g. D: to switch to D drive]
cd.. [then hit ENTER to navigate to the parent folder]
dir/w/p [then hit ENTER to list all containing directories page by page]
cd <type_directory_name> [then hit ENTER to navigate into the chosen )directory]

If that doesn't work, you'll have to manually copy the i386 folder to your hard drive, and run winnt.exe from there.

I don't believe there is any way you can make your PCMCIA CD drive the boot drive, so you can't install XP by booting from the CD.

You should really max out the RAM on the machine if you want to run XP, by the way.

#4 Post by **JaneL** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 9:19 pm

K. Eng wrote:Wrong forum! I'd move it but I think only Bill has mod privileges here. Belongs in Legacy Hardware, I believe :)

Nope, there's several mods for this one.

seb · #5 Post by **seb** » Wed Jun 15, 2005 4:09 am

I used the Windows XP Pro Utility to create the (six) setup floppy disks.

With a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive (with XP Pro install CD in it) and a floppy disk drive attached, I booted my 240x using the first floppy disk, then fed in the remaining five disks.

These six disks automatically installed the drivers for the PCMCIA CD-ROM drive, and allowed me to complete the XP Pro install without any problems.

One thing to note - the Windows XP Pro Utility I used to create the six floppy disks was quite old (I downloaded it ages ago - before any service pack had been released). This meant I had to use a XP Pro install CD that did not have any service pack slipstreamed into it. If the latest Windows XP Pro Utility is downloaded, it may allow you to use a version of a XP Pro install CD with a service pack slipstreamed into it.