Thinkpads Forum

Just acquired a nifty little Thinkpad 240x. The hard drive has no OS on it. It came with an external floppy drive and I just bought it a new external CD drive. I'm trying to get the CD drive recognized so that I can get XP loaded, but I can't get it to boot off a bootable floppy disk to get things started. I've tried several different floppies but with each one the floppy drive activates and seems to take a look at the floppy for awhile before [No Operating System Found] flashes on the screen. Checked the Bios, and under Startup everything seems normal. The floppy drive and the hard drive are listed under Startup. IBM's Bios utility says use [Shift 1] to enable or disable a device. Doing so places or removes an [!] next to the device entry. I'm not sure whether the [!] signifies enabled or disabled, so I've tried booting with each. No change in results. I always get [No Operating System Found]. Any ideas? Maybe this floppy drive is defective? I can't see anyway to add the CD drive in the Bios.

A 240X cannot boot from anything other than the hard disk drive or a floppy disk drive.

IBM never designed the BIOS to allow the laptop to boot from a CD-ROM drive, as there was never a docking station for this model of laptop. Nor can it boot from any USB connected drive (such as a USB CD drive), as there were no such devices around when the BIOS/laptop was created.

User's cannot modify the BIOS themselves to add extra functionality.

The only way that I know of to install XP (from a XP install CD) onto the blank hard disk drive of a 240X is to first use the 6 XP setup floppy disks (need to download the appropriate Windows XP (Professional or Home) utility for creating Setup Disks for Floppy Boot Install from Microsoft). I believe you will also need a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive attached via the laptop's PC card slot. (I haven't tried using a USB CD-ROM drive, but you never know, it may work!)

After booting the 240X using the first floppy disk (then feeding in the remaining 5 floppy disks), the PCMCIA Drive should start automatically and will continue the installation using the XP install CD.

I used this process a few weeks ago for a very easy, trouble-free install of XP on a 240X with 192MB of RAM and a 12GB HDD. (The only problem I did initially have was using the wrong version of the XP Utility for creating the 6 floppy disks with a XP install CD that had SP2 slipstreamed. You must make sure the floppy disk creation utility matches the Service Pack version (if any) that is slipstreamed into the XP install CD you are using, otherwise the install will bomb shortly after the 240X starts reading from the XP install CD.)

I used Microsofts utility to create the six floppies needed to boot and reinstall WinXP on my 240X. Before I started I had a 6gig hard drive with Win98SE preloaded. Later upgraded to Win 2k, Win ME, NT and finally XP. As a result it was always crashing.

I tried IBM's utility to create boot floppies but it didn't work. I have a 2.0 USB optical drive (ebay bargain!!) and the boot floppies installed that to run the XP cd.

Deleted the partition and formatted it although it meant losing IBM preinstalled stuff but as most of it didn't work anyway it seemed a small price to pay if it worked after install.

Now running very smoothly and much faster. XP is stable -no hangs so far.

The 240X now reports having a 12gig hard drive Don't know what happened here but I'm not complaining.

Considering that I was on the verge of replacing my 240X I am now one very happy bunny!