need advice with 380XD Win95 installation

[beshad]

hi guys.

i got an IBM win95 bootable diskette + Installation CD from ebay without knowing that the cd-rom driver on floppy may not be compatible with my 380XD cd-rom.now i get error message: ERROR Adaptect ASPI Device Driver not available (unable to find AIC-78XX/AIC-75XXASPI80DOS.SYS) every time i boot from floppy hence i am guessing the cd-rom drivers on this bootable diskette is likely belong to a different model IBM computer (hopefully the CD installation doesn't play up later!). this is my first vintage Thinkpad and i don't have any vintage peripherals. considering buying few blank 1.44 diskettes and a USB to 3.5" diskette external drive, download/copy the cd-rom drivers on a floppy and etc etc.

is there any other way to get the downloaded files/drivers from the internet onto my 380XD without investing on diskettes/external diskette player that is likely to be used once?

thank you for your help in advance

[Thinkpad4by3]

Try making a Windows 95 boot disk and accessing the R: (CD-ROM on that disk) If that doesn't work, try the newer W98 boot disk. That might have newer better drivers. Should work just as a basic IDEA OF CD-ROM though but there is no damage you can do. Just ise a different disk than the one you bought.

[beshad]

thanks for the help. i do have a Win95 bootable disk which i successfully boot from, fdisk, format and sys my C: drive with. however the cd-rom driver letter (R: or i expected it to to be D:) no where to be found. was i wrong thinking that built-in cd-rom drives do not need drivers and work out of the box from a Wind95 dos prompt?

[pkiff]

Not sure if I am remembering correctly, but I think used to use a generic IBM cd sys driver when I was installing Windows 95/98 on 1990's era thinkpads. Looking at an old set of boot disk files, I see one named "IBMTPCD.SYS".

My AUTOEXEC.BAT file has a single line:
MSCDEX /D:TPCD001

(Which means you need to have the file MSCDEX.EXE on your boot disk).

And the CONFIG.SYS includes the lines:
DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=SMARTDRV.EXE 2048 2048
DEVICE=IBMTPCD.SYS /R

(Which means you need HIMEM.SYS and smartdrv.exe on your boot disk as well).

I think that boot disk worked for most CDROMs in my Thinkpad 350C up to and including all my 600/770 series. Does that help?

Phil.

[beshad]

Thanks Phil, yes that was very helpful.

I will check the autoexec.bat file seeing what bootable disk is trying to load. my guess is currently what is loading is not the right driver for the installed cd-rom, hence the error message.

my main problem is lack of 1990's peripheral lol. no correct tools=no fix! i have now ordered an IBM USB to 1.44" drive plus some blank floppies so at least i can download files i need of the Internet, surely they will come handy with next vintage Thinkpad project

thanks for help guys

[pkiff]

In really old Thinkpads, you couldn't always boot from USB because the USB port actually required some drivers to load first. And sometimes you couldn't even reliably boot from CD-ROM! I can't say about the 380XD. But you could always boot from a floppy drive - either one installed directly in the Thinkpad Ultrabay/UltraSlimBay/WhateverBay, or one that was connected to the unique floppy port via one of the proprietary IBM floppy cables (though different generations of Thinkpads would sometimes use different cables and connectors - there were two or three variations I think).

When working with old Thinkpads, those special external IBM Thinkpad floppy drives with their custom cables are very handy!