Thinkpads Forum

Ok, here's the situation...my laptop which I got for college from eBay was probably an easy fix...well I haven't figured out this problem for weeks! All I have a picture from when it was on auction. Here is the picture below:
http://i12.ebayimg.com/02/i/04/01/b7/8d_1_b.JPG

Now, I still can't figure out why it won't work. I tried putting on a O/S on it and the laptop can't find the harddrive, but there is a harddrive inside. For some odd reason, the laptop won't function pass this screen upon. I need help! Thank you!

How big is the hard drive, is it set up properly and is the hard drive known to be good?

Also, is this a Pentium MMX or a Pentium II model that you own?

It's looking for a floppy disk, and then asking you to push F1.

Put a bootable floppy in the drive, and press F1. If that works, then you're getting somewhere. Try running FDISK.

(Or, have you actually put a floppy in, and it worked?)

Try reseating the hard drive. If that doesn't work, find a laptop HDD to desktop adaptor, and try it in a desktop. If that works, your motherboard's bad. If it doesn't, your drive's bad.

If he has a Pentium II model, then that's likely.

If he has a Pentium MMX model and a drive above 6gb, then it's not working because drives > 6gb require an overlay to work in most laptops before Pentium II.

Well, I think the hard drive is actually 1.2 gb. In the auction it never stated the actually speed and hard drive space, but I did take the hard drive out and read on the top 1.2 gb. The laptop didn't come with a bootable disk, so I used a Windows 98 O/S cd, for some reason the cd is meant to format the hard drive and then install windows. Well during the process, the installation needs to find the hard drive, it assumes that it's drive C. The laptop just states can't find hard drive or something like so. I'm not sure where to get a bootable disk if they're available to get for my laptop. Here is the link to the actual auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 6766364886

You can make a boot disk by going to www.bootdisk.com and downloading the appropriate file.

Also, is your drive partitioned properly?

That's what I'm thinking now...

When you boot the Windows 98 setup, exit out right away (F3, IIRC), and type FDISK at the command prompt. If that works, then there's no problem. If it doesn't, then you've got a problem.

OK, here's an update. I was wrong about Hard drive space, it is actually 64 MB. Well, I really can't explain this easy, is there a way to contact you guys on AOL or AIM? I do have the laptop currently infront of me as I test a couple ideas and such. AIM Screen Name: SpencerFrancisco

Wait a sec. You said 64 MB?

There's something screwy, or it's only a 64MB partition.

Anyway, I'm brushing the dust off of my AIM account (that'll take a while), and going on AIM to go (I don't want to install AIM on this Dell, especially considering it's going to be replaced by the ThinkPad in a couple of days, most likely).